A black, deaf employee of Google has accused the company of discriminating against her because of her disability and race. As a result, Jalon Hall, who was the first and only black deaf hire at Google, according to Wired, hit the tech giant with a huge lawsuit. This was shocking as Google has portrayed something entirely different to the public.
The company had celebrated Hall at corporate events and on social media as a success story for the search giant’s inclusive workplace. However, her reality of working there is far from this. Therefore, she sued the company for limiting her access to sign-language interpreters months after starting the job.
She also went into detail about how Google’s management environment is hostile and racially charged. According to the complaint, a manager at the company’s machine-learning research program called her an “aggressive black deaf woman” and told her to “keep her mouth shut and take a sales role.”
She is also suing the company for excluding her from roundtable discussions and not giving her an overdue promotion. She claims this was due to “inaccurate evaluation” after almost four years. Hall is still a level two employee, while most are already level three workers after three years.
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“Google is using me to make them look inclusive for the Deaf community and the overall Disability community,” Hall told Wired. “In reality, they need to do better.” Many would have believed what Google paraded online if Hall had not come forward with her story.
For example, on LinkedIn, they praised Hall for “helping expand opportunities for Black Deaf professionals.” On Instagram, they featured her on their official page for “making #LifeAtGoogle more inclusive.” Therefore, on the outside, it looks like things are going smoothly for the research analyst at work.
According to the suit, she joined the company as a content moderator in 2020, and the recruiters promised to provide sign language interpreters. However, a couple of months later, they assigned her to enforce YouTube’s child safety regulations.
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Moreover, they refused to provide interpreters to help her review the content. The Google employee could not reach her daily quota of reviewing 75 videos without her interpreter. According to her, she would often watch an entire video, sometimes exceeding an hour, before realizing she couldn’t adequately assess its content.
“I felt a sense of humiliation, recognizing that my career wasn’t progressing,” she told Wired. She filed three complaints with HR, but they did not take her seriously. Therefore, she had no choice but to sue.
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Hall also told Wired that she will stay at Google to ensure better working conditions for other people with disabilities. “It would be selfish to quit Google,” she said. “I’m standing in the gap for those often pushed aside.”
According to a recent report, Black and disabled employees constitute a small minority at Google, a company with nearly 183,000 workers around the world. Their deaf and hard-of-hearing employee group consists of only 40 members. Black women also consist of only 2.4 percent of the workforce in the U.S.
Therefore, these statistics show that Hall has a solid case and might even win against the tech giant.
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