(Newswire.net — September 20, 2015) — Katie Moussouris, a former security program manager at Microsoft, claims this mega corporation practices amount to gender discrimination, the Business Insider reported.
She filed a class-action lawsuit in Federal Distirct court claiming Microsoft was discriminating not only against her but against other female workers as well.
According to the lawsuit, her less qualified colleagues were rewarded with promotions while Moussouris was constantly passed over. The lawsuit calls on the Washington Law Against Discrimination, claiming the company relies on sexist policies.
The lawsuit claims that in Microsoft’s internal system of work evaluation, male workers on a regularl basis scores higher than female workers.
“It is an artificial system that requires winners and losers,” said Kelly Dermody, attorney at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, one of two firms representing Moussouris. “There’s no performance-based need to do that.”
The Business Insider finds that Moussouris made internal complaints about a superior sexually harassing her female colleagues, which Microsoft dismissed but later reassigned him.
In a statement, Microsoft said it was “committed to a diverse workforce,” however, the giant’s workforce is 76% male and has only 12 percent female executives.
Microsoft confirmed that the company reviewed theplaintif’s alegations, however, didn’t find anything that would support her claim.
Microsoft isn’t the first tech firm to have its internal policies called into question. Earlier this year, a lawsuit was filed against Twitter for double standards against male and female workers.
Moussouris left Microsoft in May 2014, after working for the company for seven years. She is a visiting scholar at MIT’s Sloan School of Business and a New America Foundation Fellow, and chief policy officer at a cybersecurity startup HackerOne.