Three Amazon employees sued their employer on Monday, alleging gender discrimination and accusing the company of retaliation after they complained about “chronic pay inequities”.
Caroline Wilmuth, Katherine Schomer and Erin Combs, who work in various roles within Amazon’s corporate research and strategy division, claim the company assigns female employees lower job titles for the same roles held by men with higher titles and higher salaries. The company then “regularly fails” to promote women, “resulting in them performing similar work as men in higher job codes for less compensation”.
Starting in late 2021, the three women raised these concerns with their managers and Amazon’s human resources department, which triggered an investigation into whether the employees were being misclassified because of their gender. Wilmuth said that of the four researchers on her team, three female employees were classified in lower-paid job categories, while the only male researcher was classified in a higher-paid, more senior role. The male researcher earned “approximately 150% of Schomer’s salary,” according to the complaint.
Wilmuth, Schomer and Combs allege that Amazon retaliated against them “within weeks” of speaking out by demoting them, “severely” reducing their workloads and moving their direct reports to another team overseen by a male executive they had accused of gender discrimination.
“When I discovered that I was being paid significantly less than the men on my team, I was stunned and devastated,” Wilmuth said in a statement. “Then, after I complained, Amazon made it worse by taking away the team I founded and built from the ground up – and demoting me to a position with much less opportunity for advancement.”
In March, an investigator assigned to look into Wilmuth’s concerns determined that Amazon’s decision to move her reports 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 Wilmuth’s team, who acknowledged that the reorganisation was “discriminatory, across gender lines” and had harmed Wilmuth, Schomer and Combs.
Amazon spokesman Brad Glasser disputed the lawsuit, saying in a statement: “We believe these allegations are false and will demonstrate that through the legal process.
He added that Amazon doesn’t tolerate discrimination in the workplace and investigates all reported incidents of such behaviour.
The class action was filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington. It was filed by Outten & Golden, the same New York law firm that represented a Google executive in her successful gender bias lawsuit, as well as Uber software engineers who sued the company for gender and racial discrimination.
Amazon has faced allegations of gender and racial discrimination from tech and corporate workers in recent years. The company launched a review of its employee review system in 2021 following allegations of racial bias, and a separate investigation into discrimination and bias in its cloud computing unit. In April last year, Amazon announced it was conducting a racial equity audit of its frontline employees, led by former attorney general Loretta Lynch.
