In the spring of Kelly Ellis arrived for her first day of work at Google. I think that a lot of people um back then and still now, consider Google to be kind of a dream job. You always hear about them in the news having all of these amazing perks, and you see the pictures of like the nap pods and the gym and all the food and everything. Kelly was twenty five at the time, and she'd worked hard
to get there. She had the degree a minor and computer science in college, and she had the experience four years as a software engineer. Like every new hire, she was given a colorful baseball cap with a propeller on it, called a Noogler hat. Then she was whisked through orientation. I was excited. Um, it was like a lot of information. It was a lot to take in, but I was like,
this is going to be great. As one of Google's twenty thousand or so employees at the time, Kelly dove into the work, but it wasn't long before she started noticing things that didn't sit well with her little hints about salaries at Google, it seemed like her male colleagues were making more money. I remember talking to other women engineers about their similar frustrations. I think I just didn't want to believe that Google could be evil. When it
comes down to it, Kelly isn't at Google anymore. When she left, her plan was to put her experience behind her and move on with her career. And that's just what she did until other people, including the government, started seeing the same red flags. Now Kelly finds herself in a high profile battle against one of the largest companies in the world. She's suing Google for discrimination. Hi. I'm Akio and I'm Ellen Hewittt. And this week on Decrypted, we're taking a look at pay equity at one of
Silicon Valley's most celebrated companies. Kelly Ellis and three other women are suing Google, and they're hoping to expand their lawsuit into a class action case on behalf of thousands of women who worked for the company. We partnered up with The Revealed Podcasts from the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX to bring you this episode today Stay with us. Kelly is on her second job since she left Google. She works out of Oakland for a tech startup, and
we recently caught up over lunch. Hey, Hey, nice to see you good, to see you good. I've been here for lunch before. I haven't either. I've been following Kelly on Twitter for years, way before this lawsuit started, because she's been so vocal about her experience as a woman in tech. She has a tiny old septum ring in her nose and Where's glasses that she nudges with the back of her hand. You want to do anything besides the water. I'm surprised by how approachable she is in person,
because she's pretty salty online. Aki and I first met Kelly at her lawyer's office and she talked to us about her time at Google. She says that she started seeing the warning signs almost immediately when she learned she'd be working with what's called front end code. And that was really really surprising to me because it was really different from what I had been doing before. I would say a lot of people in the software world looked at front end engineering as something that like, you didn't
need a degree to do. This is an important distinction in software engineering. Front End coding, which Kelly was assigned to, focuses on what the consumer sees in their browser. Back End coding interacts with the plumbing, like servers and databases, and that's what Kelly had done before she came to Google, and I very quickly noticed that that was where all of my women colleagues were working, was in front of engineering.
So I was like, that's kind of annoying. But at the same time I was still like, well, I'm at Google, though. You know, at Google everyone has a level, starting at level one for interns and hourly workers, up to level ten or higher for top executives. The higher you are, the more you tend to get paid, and Kelly started to suspect that she was hired at the wrong level.
I had had another software engineer joined my same team the week after I did, and he and I both graduated in the same year, but he was level four when I was level three. On top of that, there was a whole group of new grads straight out of college who joined a couple of months after Kelly. They were all starting at the same level that I who was at, and that was when I was like, this feels wrong. But when I would ask people about it, they would say, well, you know, we sometimes downslop people
and then we'll just correct it come promotion time. Kelly applied for promotion. She says the committee reviewing her application agreed she was doing the work of a level four, but they didn't promote her because she hadn't been at Google long enough to show an upward trajectory. And that was when I realized, like that I was always going to be playing catch up because like by the time that I was going for promotion from four to five, like the people who were four were already at level five.
So I was frustrated, but I was still like, well, it's still Google, you know. Um, I don't think I considered quitting. Did you even talk about that with a man issure or maybe like an hr rep And not with an hr rep but with managers? And again I was just sort of told like trust the system, Like it didn't seem like there was any remedy. Kelly later did get promoted twice and was able to move into a back end engineering team, but after four years, she quit to go work for a smaller company where she
felt she'd have more opportunities to grow. She tried to put her experiences at Google behind her. I kind of always felt like, yes, this probably has something to do with my gender, but I like fell through the cracks somehow, you know, and my case isn't typical. Three years later, in Kelly was browsing the news online when she saw
an article about a government investigation into Google. In a court hearing, a lawyer with the Department of Labor said that they had found evidence of systemic compensation disparities at the company. I mean, I was like, but I was like, okay, like now this is getting real. Um, And I read the article and I was like, yep, yep, yep, yep. Learning about the government's investigation made Kelly see her experience
in a different light. Around the same time, a San Francisco lawyer named Jim Bimberg read about the same investigation. Jim's a lawyer at the firm aut Schuler Burson, and he specializes in workplace discrimination cases. He remembers how struck he was by the statistical claims cited by the Department of Labor about the alleged difference in what Google paid
women and what it paid men. The government found a gap so significant that it was incredibly unlikely for it to have happened by chance, basically about one and one hundred million. Jim compares it to a coin toss. So if I flip a coin, there's a one in two chance that it will be heads. If I flip a coin a thousand times and it's only had once out of a thousand times, well that's a lot more suspicious
than if it's once out of two times. Jim discussed the government's findings with a couple other lawyers, and they decided to ask former and current Google employees to get in touch if they were interested in talking. We put a post on the internet and didn't necessarily think we would get much of a response, but we got called about who said, yeah, it's terrible women are paid less and then for the same work. Kelly was one of
the women who saw Jim's post. She filled out an online form and then met Jim and his colleagues to tell her story in person, and she heard the other women's stories too. I felt that I was finally realizing that this wasn't a well intended accident. And I'm not saying that they set out to discriminate against women, but I fully believe that they know about the problem and decided not to fix it. Kelly agreed to be a named plaintiff, along with two other women represented by Jim.
The three women filed a lawsuit in September. In the complaint, they said that Google pays women less than men for equal or similar work. They also said that the company puts women on career paths with lower pace ceilings. The lawsuit made international news Welcome back Alphabet investors just storting shaking off concerns over the gender discrimination lawsuit filed against Google yesterday. According to lawsuit accuses Google of paid discrimination
against women. Three women who used to work for Google file the suit yesterday. They claimed the tech join Google the line our request for an interview, but the company has denied the allegations detailed in the lawsuit. The company published a blog post last month that addressed pay equity and the results are very different from the government's findings that we told you about earlier. Google said it reviewed
the salaries of of its workforce. It excluded the jobs that it said weren't held by enough workers for the company to run a reliable analysis. For the job categories it examined. Google says it found a pay gap among a tiny group of workers. The company says it has since closed that gap. Hey good, Welcome to the Superior Court. Just the other week, the latest hearing in Kelly's lawsuit took place in San Francisco. I met up with Jim, the lawyer, outside the courthouse. Jim has big plans for
the lawsuit. He wants it to be a class action case. Today's here ring is to discuss the number of jobs that the proposed class action would cover. Thank you, good morning please. Jim's team argues that thirty different jobs should be included. Google's lawyers argue for a smaller number. The judge Mary Wiss rules in favor of Kelly and the other plaintiffs. I catch up with Kelly afterwards. Hey, so I don't know if it was it good? Yeah, it's good.
And how does it feel to you a personally? Um? Good? I mean it just feels kind of like another step in the journey. You know, There's there's a lot more to go, and so it's not like it feels like a victory really, but it was a the result that we're hoping for. And I have to get to work. Yeah, I'm not gonna go back to work. YEA. Pursuing this case hasn't come without its costs. Because of how vocal
she's been on gender issues. Kelly's faced a lot of online harassment over the years, and the lawsuit elevated her profile even more. What are the kind of things that the online trolls say to you? I mean, it's anything from you know, the wage gap isn't real, get back in the kitchen and make me a sandwich, to like you deserve to be raped, to teach you a lesson about, you know, going after tech companies because you couldn't cut
it as an engineer. Recently, one of the men who threatened her online got ahold of her phone number and started calling her. When she told him to stop, he told Kelly that he was in her neighborhood and mentioned a restaurant on her block. She filed a restraining order against him. But despite all of that, she says she still doesn't regret speaking up and so like lucky to have had all the opportunities UM that landed me in
this career. A lot of that comes from my privilege, and I really want other people to have the opportunity because I do think that like technology is the future of the economy, and I wanted to be available to everyone and for everyone to have the chance to succeed. UM and if you know entire groups of people are being compensated unfairly or not given the same opportunities because of factors that they can't help, then that's not the
kind of industry I want to be in. For now, Kelly's trying to live her life as normally as possible, going to work, hanging out with friends as she waits for the suit to move forward. Jim expects to file a motion on her behalf early next year to get the case certified as a class action suit. If approved, that would open it up to thousands of women who've worked at Google. And that's it for this week's episode of Decrypted. Thanks for listening. Are you a woman in
the tech industry. We'd love to hear your story. You can send us an email at Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net. I'm on Twitter at Ellen Hewitt, and I'm at aki Itto seven. Please consider leaving us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or any of your favorite podcasts apps.
It really helps us find new listeners. Today's episode was produced in collaboration with the Reveal podcast from the Center for Investigative Reporting and pr X. Thank you to our producers, Pia Getkari Magnus Hendrickson and Liz Smith, as well as Taki Telenitas, Katherine Muskowski, Kevin Sullivan, Jim Briggs, Fernando Aruda and Buenda Josa from the team at Reveal. Francesco Leavie is head of Boomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week. M m hm