Uber faces engineers’ lawsuit alleging gender, race bias

UBER Technologies, Inc. was sued by three Latina engineers who claim the company pays women and people of color less than their peers and doesn’t promote them as frequently as males, whites and Asians.

The case joins others targeting the technology sector’s domination by white males. Twitter, Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are both fighting suits accusing them of thwarting the advancement of female technical workers and engineers. Google was hit in September with a class action alleging it systemically pays male employees more than their female counterparts.

The three women from the ridehailing company, one of whom still works there, accused Uber of violating California’s Equal Pay Act in a complaint filed Tuesday in San Francisco state court on behalf of all engineers similarly held back.

The women filed the complaint under a state statute that gives employees the right to step into the shoes of the state labor secretary to bring enforcement actions. That law also may give them a way around a provision in Uber’s contracts requiring workplace disputes to go through one-on-one arbitration instead of as group actions in court.

Uber uses a “stack ranking” system for evaluating employees, which requires supervisors to rank them from worst to best and results in inaccurate and subjective decisions about their performance, according to the complaint. The case against Microsoft, filed in Seattle federal court in 2015, includes similar allegations.

“Female employees and employees of color are systematically undervalued compared to their male and white or Asian American peers because female employees and employees of color receive, on average, lower rankings despite equal or better performance,” according to the complaint against Uber.

Matt Wing, a spokesman for Uber, declined to comment on the suit. —