Google’s Latest Foe: The U.S. Government

Google’s motto used to be “Don’t be evil.” But recent controversies have made it harder for the ad giant to claim the moral high ground.

Advertisers have recently gotten upset because Google was putting their ads alongside hateful content on YouTube. And now the company is being accused of discriminating against women.

Google, part of the Alphabet corporation, has systematically paid its female employees less than its male employees, a Department of Labor manager said in court on Friday, according to the Guardian.

“We found systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce,” Janette Wipper, a DoL regional director, testified in a San Francisco court, according to the newspaper.

Disparities in pay are nothing new in Silicon Valley -- or all of America, really -- but this case was “very significant,” an anonymous DoL official told the Guardian.

Google vehemently denied disparities in a statement, calling the charges “unfounded” and saying the government hasn’t provided any data to back up its claim. In fact, just this week, Google said it had “closed the gender pay gap globally.”

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