Three female Amazon employees have filed a lawsuit against the company alleging gender discrimination. The employees have accused the company of retaliation after filing a complaint about “unequal pay issues.”
Carolyn Wilmoth, Katherine Schumer and Erin Combs, who work in various roles within the corporate research and strategy department, said the company assigns female employees with lower job titles to the same roles as men with higher titles and higher salaries. The company then “regularly fails to promote women, resulting in them performing work similar to men in higher job codes for less money.”
Beginning in late 2021, the three women expressed these concerns to their managers and Amazon’s human resources department, leading to an investigation into whether employees were misclassified because of their gender.
Wilmoth said that of the four researchers on her team, three female employees were classified into lower-paying job categories, while the only male researcher was classified into a higher-paying, higher-level role.
Wilmoth, Schumer and Combs alleged that Amazon retaliated against them “within weeks” of them speaking out by demoting them, “sharply reducing” their scope of work and transferring their direct reports to another team supervised by a male executive, who was accused of gender discrimination.
“When I found out I was being paid significantly less than the men on my team, I was stunned and devastated,” Wilmoth said in a statement. “Amazon then made it worse after I complained by pulling the team I founded and built from scratch — and demoting me to a position that had less opportunity.” Much for career advancement.”
In March, an investigator tasked with looking into Wilmoth’s concerns determined that Amazon’s decision to shift its reporting to another team overseen by a male executive had a “disparate impact” on women, according to the complaint. During the investigation, the investigator spoke to the male researcher on Wilmoth’s team, who admitted that the reorganization was “discriminatory, occurred across gender lines” and disadvantaged Wilmot, Schumer, and Combs.
Amazon spokesman Brad Glaser disputed the lawsuit, saying in a statement: “We believe these allegations are false and will prove so through legal action.”
He added that Amazon does not tolerate discrimination in the workplace, and that it investigates all reported incidents of such behavior.
Amazon has faced allegations of gender and racial discrimination from tech workers and companies in recent years. The company in 2021 opened a review of its employee review system after allegations of racial bias, and a separate investigation into discrimination and bias in its cloud computing unit.
2023-11-23 22:25:00
#female #employees #sue #Amazon #unequal #wages
