Women fail in bid to achieve class action status in Microsoft gender discrimination lawsuit

Microsoft has been contestinga gender discrimination case since 2015 which claimed that Microsoft’s “company-wide policies and practices systematically violate female technical employees’ rights and result in the unchecked gender bias that pervades its corporate culture.”

The case was filed by three former Microsoft employees Katherine Moussouris, Holly Muenchow and Dana Piermarini and was initially ruled in Microsoft’s favour.

The lawsuit however uncovered that there were 238 reports of gender discrimination filed between 2010 and 2016 and the complainants subsequently made a case for a class-action lawsuit covering over 8,600 women in various Microsoft offices across the US.

That attempt was however denied by the District Court of Washington that held that the proposed putative class members were not shown to be victims of a standard companywide policy.

From there the case was referred to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, who today delivered an early Christmas present to Microsoft by upholding the original ruling.

A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling which concluded that the plaintiffs didn’t prove that a uniform Microsoft corporate policy or action adversely affected women.

Microsoft has always denied a culture of gender discrimination exists, saying it “provides an environment where all employees have the opportunity to be successful.”

Via Bloomberg Law