Microsoft Hit With Gender Discrimination Lawsuit

Microsoft’s former female employee is taking the company to court over gender bias that resulted in lower salaries and lack of promotions for women in technical roles. She resigned in 2014 after seven years with the company, the lawsuit says, because supervisors failed to address what she claimed was pervasive discrimination. At Microsoft, Moussouris was responsible for bounty programs and Microsoft Vulnerability Research in the company’s Trustworthy Computing Group.

As Reuters reports, Moussouris claims she was passed over for promotions that were eventually given to less-qualified men, and says women are routinely given lower ratings through this system because of subjective criteria. This means that Microsoft may be in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Washington Law Against Discrimination.

Obviously, such accusations do not sit well with Microsoft, especially after a comment made by CEO Satya Nadella, in which he said that female employees should wait for companies to offer them raises and not to specifically ask for them. Kelly Dermody, an attorney at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein describes it as an “artificial system that requires winners and losers”. “There’s no performance-based need to do that”. Even though Microsoft found these allegations to have merit, it merely reassigned him.

Yet, before he was transferred when he was still her boss, he allegedly “retaliated against” Moussouris by giving her a low bonus that year, the complaint says.

Moussouris is a visiting scholar at MIT’s Sloan School of Business and a New America Foundation Fellow. Now, Katie Moussouris has filed a sex discrimination lawsuit against her ex-employer Microsoft Corp, in the US. She is now chief policy officer for HackerOne, a cybersecurity startup.

Microsoft’s workforce is 76% male, while its management tier is 88% male.

“We’re committed to a diverse workforce, and to a workplace where all employees have the chance to succeed”, a Microsoft spokesman said. The company said it had previously reviewed Moussouris’ allegations about her experiences “and did not find anything to substantiate those claims, and we will carefully review this new complaint”.

This case is not a first of its kind as we have already seen similarly high profile gender bias cases this year involving Twitter, Facebook, and more popularly, Ellen Pao‘s case against Kleiner Perkins.