The tool Google gave her to write a self-review is where she says the pay math fell apart
A Black executive at Google says it kept her pay below its own salary range for years - and that an internal AI tool is how she found out.
The executive, who has worked at Google's Cambridge, Massachusetts operation since 2017, sued the company on August 31 in federal court in Massachusetts. Her complaint accuses Google of race discrimination and retaliation under Title VII and Section 1981 - federal laws that bar race bias at work. She is Black, and the filing says the company underpaid her, held back her advancement, and retaliated after she complained.
For HR leaders, the case is worth a read because it touches so much of the function at once: pay equity, job leveling, performance ratings, arbitration terms, and whether an HR team actually resolves the complaints it gets.
Google's pay structure sits at the center of the filing. According to the complaint, the company gives every job a "level," and each level ties to a salary range and a "role profile" that reflects an employee's duties. The filing alleges Google slots Black employees into lower levels than they have earned, pays them less within those levels, and steers them toward roles with little room to grow. Performance reviews make it worse, the complaint says: it alleges Black employees are rated below what their work merits and are more likely to get a "Not Enough Impact" review, which the filing calls "the death knell for advancement."
Her own pay is the clearest example in the complaint. After she earned an "Outstanding Impact" rating for her 2022 work, the filing says, she received only a modest raise. When she asked why, according to the complaint, her manager said he had reduced her recommended base pay to raise the salary of a non-Black colleague.
According to the complaint, the rest surfaced through Google's own AI tool. The filing says that later in 2026, Google asked her to use its internal AI tool to help write parts of her self-assessment. The tool required her role profile - and that, the complaint says, is how she found her role profile had been wrong for years. The profile that matched her actual work carried a salary range of $251,000 to $279,000, according to the filing, while the one she had been assigned ran $232,000 to $261,000. Her salary was $248,000.
She had already pulled her official pay range in January 2026 under Massachusetts' pay transparency law, the filing says, which gave her a number to press against. After she flagged the gap, according to the complaint, Google offered to raise her base pay to $252,000 - but only if she reaffirmed the arbitration agreement she had signed when hired in 2017, a clause that would route any dispute to a private forum rather than a court.
The complaint says that demand conflicted with a settlement in a separate case, Curley v. Google, which it says bars the company from requiring or enforcing mandatory arbitration in employment disputes "through and including August 2026." The filing alleges Google pressed her to reaffirm arbitration anyway. She refused, it says, and filed her suit before that protection ran out.
The complaint is also pointed about HR. It alleges the department is "ineffective at resolving complaints of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation," and that employees who come forward "suffer retaliation." The filing describes repeated trips to HR - over pay and over what she describes as a hostile environment - that she says went nowhere.
The complaint also describes specific incidents. It says she received anonymous racist emails at work, including one that called her an "incompetent diversity hire who did not earn her job." In a separate episode, according to the filing, a coworker "burst through the door, physically threatening her and demanding to see her badge" after she knocked on a shared wall during posted quiet hours. HR's suggested fix, the complaint says, was for her to move to a different location.
After she reported her manager's pay practices, the filing alleges, he retaliated - cutting her out of key meetings and site visits, reassigning high-profile work, and giving her vague criticism and middling ratings.
She is asking for back pay, compensation for the harm she describes, and punitive damages, and she wants a jury to hear the case.
The allegations have not been tested, and no court has ruled on the claims.
