Kelly M. Dermody

Dermody’s many cases involve wage suppression, gender discrimination and matters related to the recent #MeToo movement.

Dermody and co-counsel filed a high-profile gender discrimination class action against Google LLC last year which alleged that in six job categories — software engineer, software engineer manager, engineer, program manager, sales and early childhood education — Google neglected to pay women the same as men for equal or similar work.

“In the past year, we filed the Google gender equal pay case, which is one of the first cases that has been prosecuting equal pay claims under the amended California Equal Pay Act — the Fair Pay Act,” said Dermody, who’s the managing partner of Lieff Cabraser’s San Francisco office and chair of the firm’s employment law group. “So that’s been, I think, an important piece of litigation independent of our role in it... It’s a piece of litigation that’s being watched because it has the potential to actually flesh out some of the standards of the amended law.”

She added that the case is one of the rare class action cases being prosecuted in solely in California state court that challenges equal pay practices systemically, with most cases in that area seen in federal court under federal law. Ellis, et al. v. Google Inc., CGC-17-561299 (San Francisco Super. Ct., filed Sept. 14, 2017).

“The case is trying to address what is a longstanding and difficult problem in Silicon Valley, and across many industries of women being paid less than men for doing similar or equal work,” she said. “And I think that it really puts the companies, you know, generally, on notice that just paying lip service to equal employment opportunity is not sufficient, that you have to really monitor pay practices at a more granular level to ensure that men and women are not being paid differently.”

Dermody said that the case will be moving forward to get class certification probably next year, and that it is currently in discovery.

She also cited her work in a national class action against Goldman Sachs for the claim that the company discriminates against female employees for pay, promotions and evaluations. She received class action certification for the case in March. Chen-Oster v. Goldman Sachs, 10-6950 (S.D. N.Y. March 30, 2018).

“It’s a really interesting case,” she said. “There’s a really important part of the case, which is data analysis.”

She said that in a case like this, the counsel gains access to the company’s personnel payroll data, which includes information about performance, past positions and employers, education and prior pay. Then, an expert creates a model to see if the data could account for differences in pay.

“In our case, our expert — after controlling for all these objective characteristics — found a statistically significant gender pay gap that was a 21 percent difference in pay for women vice presidents, an eight percent difference in pay for women associates compared to men with the same characteristics.”

She said these profound differences could snowball over the course of a career and put someone at a disadvantage from the start.

— Caroline Hart