Software giant Oracle paid some of its female employees more than $13,000 less than men in equivalent jobs, according to a report filed in a gender-bias lawsuit against the company.
The plaintiffs are asking for class action status, seeking to bring in thousands of other women who work or have worked in several departments at the Redwood City firm since 2013.
UC Irvine economist David Neumark’s report on the alleged pay disparity for some women at Oracle was submitted to support the six plaintiffs’ bid for class action certification, Wired reported Friday.
The class of employees would include 4,200 female workers in the firm’s product development, information technology, and support functions, according to Wired.
“The analysis found that most of the difference in earnings between men and women stemmed from bonuses and stock grants, rather than base pay,” Wired reported. “Women’s base pay was 3.8 percent less than comparable men, according to the analysis. But women’s bonuses, on average, were 13.2 percent less than men in the same job codes; for stock grants, the disparity was 33.1 percent.”
Oracle, led by executive chairman Larry Ellison — reportedly the 10th-richest person on the planet with an estimated worth of $59 billion — declined to comment on the reported pay disparity.
Neumark concluded that the difference in compensation resulted from Oracle’s practice of relying on employees’ previous pay when setting initial salaries, according to Wired.
The firm stopped looking at previous pay in October 2017 when California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law banning employers from asking about salary histories, Wired reported.
The lawsuit was filed in 2017 in San Mateo County Superior Court by engineers Rong Jewett, Sophy Wang and Xian Murray, with three additional plaintiffs joining later.
Google is fighting a similar lawsuit, and has denied having a gender pay gap.
