by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, April 11, 2017

Google denied allegations by the U.S. Department of Labor (DoL) that a pay gap exists across the company.

The response published Tuesday focuses on wanting to know the reasons behind the allegation and asserting that its practices are “blind” to gender when compensating an employee through their base salary, bonus and equity based on the role, job level, location and performance rating.

Google says the analysts who calculate the compensation have no access to gender information about the employee. The information is fed into an equity model to determine compensation, wrote Eileen Naughton, VP or people operations at Google, in a blog post.

The response follows a claim by the Labor department at the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs that it has “evidence of systemic compensation disparities.”

Now the U.S. department is seeking thousands of employee records, including contact details of our employees, in addition to the hundreds of thousands of documents the company already produced in response to 18 different document requests, Naughton wrote.

Naughton details the pay equity model, writing that the model “looks at employees in the same job categories, and analyzes their compensation to confirm that the adjusted amount shows no statistically significant differences between men’s and women’s compensation.”

The Guardian brings up the point that “Google is a federal contractor, which means it is required to allow the DoL to inspect and copy records and information about its compliance with equal opportunity laws.”

But Google is not the first company to face discriminatory legal action, according to one report. In September, the DoL filed a lawsuit against the Palo Alto data analytics company Palantir, and in January, the department sued Oracle.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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