USA TODAY International Edition
Palantir charged with hiring bias against Asians
Data analytics firm says it plans to fight discrimination suit
The Labor Department is suing prominent Silicon Valley data company Palantir Technologies to end what it alleges is a pattern of discrimination against Asian job applicants.
The lawsuit filed Monday with the Labor Department’s Office of Administrative Law Judges also seeks compensation including lost wages for Asian job applicants, the department said.
Palantir said it “firmly” denied the allegations in the lawsuit.
“We intend to vigorously defend against these allegations,” the Silicon Valley company said in an emailed statement.
Palantir is a notoriously secretive data analytics company valued by private investors at about $ 20 billion, making it one of technology’s biggest “unicorns.” Its software compiles data from dis- parate sources and then scours that data for patterns and connections for the federal government and companies in the private sector.
As a federal government contractor that provides software and data analysis to the FBI, the U. S. Special Operations Command and the Army, it is barred from discriminating based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or against military veterans.
The Labor Department said it filed the administrative lawsuit after being unable to resolve the case. At risk are Palantir’s existing government contracts. It could be barred from future federal contracts.
The lawsuit stems from a compliance review that found starting in January 2010, Palantir’s hiring practices routinely discriminated against Asian applicants for software engineering jobs. Asian applicants were eliminated in the résumé screening and telephone interview phases of hiring despite being as qualified as white applicants, the Labor Department alleges.
In one example cited by the lawsuit, Palantir reviewed more than 130 qualified applicants for an engineering intern position, 73% of whom were Asian. The company hired 17 non- Asian applicants and four Asians.
The lawsuit comes amid growing attention to the diversity of the work force at Silicon Valley tech companies. Most of the focus has been on the lack of women, Latinos and African Americans.