Apple Sued by Employees Alleging Unequal Pay for Women
Lawsuit says company’s hiring and performance-review practices routinely slant toward men
3 min
Two female Apple employees filed a proposed class-action lawsuit Thursday alleging the company pays women lower salaries than men for similar work.
The suit, filed in a San Francisco state court, targets Apple’s hiring practices used to set compensation, as well as the company’s performance-review policies. It is the latest in a series of pay equity lawsuits against major corporations, including large tech giants, that allege they underpay women and minorities .
The lawsuit seeks to represent a class of 12,000 women employed at Apple across several departments who have worked there since 2020. The plaintiffs allege that the company is violating the California equal pay, employment and unfair business practice laws. The business practice law limits claims to a four-year period.
An Apple spokesman said the company has achieved and maintained gender pay equity since 2017. Apple works with an independent third-party expert to examine team members’ total compensation and makes adjustments where necessary, he said.
Google and Oracle settled similar claims in California in recent years, pushing similar arguments about pay policies for new hires. Google agreed to pay 15,500 women $118 million to settle its case in 2022 and Oracle agreed to pay $25 million for 4,000 female workers earlier this year. The companies didn’t admit wrongdoing.
One of the lead attorneys on those cases is also representing the plaintiffs against Apple.
Central to the new lawsuit is how Apple sets a new hire’s compensation. Before 2018, Apple asked applicants to provide their previous salaries to determine pay, the suit says.
When California passed a 2018 law that banned employers from considering prior pay to set compensation, Apple asked applicants about pay expectations instead, the suit says. The plaintiffs’ lawyers argue that the practice of asking about pay expectations perpetuates gender discrimination because women have historically been paid less than men.
“If you do pay women less, you can’t defend it by saying they were willing to take less money,” said James Finberg , one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys.
One of the plaintiffs, Justina Jong, said she discovered a male co-worker’s W2 left behind on a printer in Apple’s Sunnyvale, Calif., branch. Though she had the same responsibilities as her male co-worker, she saw his base salary in the tax filing was $10,000 more than what she made, she said. She discovered the discrepancy several years ago, about midway through her decade-plus career at Apple, where she held several roles in sales, training and marketing.
“I felt terrible and was shocked as well. I saw myself as a hardworking person, and collaborative, providing a lot of solutions for the team,” Jong said in an interview. “I thought to myself, ‘Maybe if I work harder, they will see that I’m worth just as much or more.’”
The lawsuit alleges that when Apple hired Jong in 2013, it paid her the same base salary she earned at her previous job. In the years following, the company never gave her the kind of raise that put her on equal footing with her male peers, the suit says.
Jong said it took her years to decide to challenge the discrepancy and sign onto the lawsuit. She said she was spurred by stories about unequal pay from other women at the company.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Apple faced a rise in employee activism. Apple workers organized to form a group called Apple Too to mirror the #MeToo movement, which gathered stories of discrimination and pushed the company to change its pay practices. The movement led to some retail stores forming unions.
“At Apple we are deeply committed to inclusion and we have a longstanding commitment to pay equity, which is embedded in our approach to compensating our valued team members,” a spokesman for Apple said.
The other named plaintiff, Amina Salgado, has worked at Apple since 2012 in various roles, including as a manager in the AppleCare division in the company’s office near Sacramento. She discovered she was paid less than men in similar roles, and she complained several times about the discrepancy, according to the lawsuit. Apple hired a third party to investigate, and after the report concluded she was right, the company increased her pay. She didn’t get back pay, the lawsuit says.
The suit also claims that Apple uses biased criteria in its performance-review system. Men routinely receive higher ratings for the discretionary categories of leadership and teamwork, leading to better reviews for men, the plaintiffs’ lawyers argue.
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Investors are bracing for a bumpier fall stock market due to shifting odds of a Federal Reserve interest-rate increase and other macro challenges.
3 min
The stock market had a decent summer. Investors are bracing for a bumpier fall.
In the past couple of months, equity investors cheered soaring profits at big companies, shrugged off jitters in the bond market and nudged megacap tech shares back near records.
Now, as the post-Labor Day stretch begins, a number of new challenges lie ahead: ever-shifting odds of an interest-rate increase from the Federal Reserve. Sky-high expectations after a stunning earnings season. The persistent threat of higher consumer prices as fighting in the Middle East drags on.
“You’re moving from this earnings-driven market to this macro-driven market with the Fed, inflation and interest rates in focus,” said Keith Lerner, chief investment adviser for Truist Advisory Services. “It tends to be a choppier period.”
Historically, every major U.S. stock index experiences its worst average return in September. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has slid an average 1.1% in the ninth month of the year, in data that dates back to the 19th century. The S&P 500 has seen the same average decline—and for every September dating back to 1928, the benchmark ends the month lower more than half of the time.
Analysts caution against reading too much into those seasonal patterns. But in recent weeks, new reasons for investor caution have emerged. One of the largest: the looming threat of an interest-rate increase from the Fed, which announces its next policy decision on Sept. 16.
Chairman Kevin Warsh’s decision to ditch forward guidance and take more of his cues from markets has muddied the waters for investors when it comes to monetary policy. That has left traders scouring Fed governor speeches and economic-data reports for clues on the central bank’s next move.
“There’s going to be a lot of eyes on those numbers,” said John Luke Tyner, head of fixed income and portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors.
The past couple of weeks offered just one example of how frequently those expectations can change. After Warsh struck a hawkish tone during remarks on Aug. 28, the odds of a hike at the Fed’s next meeting jumped from 35% before the speech to 58%, according to CME FedWatch data.
On Thursday, Fed governor Christopher Waller made a case for leaving rates where they are. Interest-rate futures showed coin-flip odds between a hike and a hold. Then Friday’s robust jobs report amped up rate-hike bets once more, back to a roughly 60% chance of higher rates after the meeting.
“Rates have really been driving the car for equities the last few weeks,” said Ross Mayfield, an investment strategist at Baird.
That uncertainty comes as an unruly bond market could put pressure on stocks. Treasury yields have marched higher for much of the summer, driven by concerns about rising oil prices, growing U.S. budget deficits and a deluge of tech-company bonds now competing for investors’ cash. Last week, the rout went global, pushing yields to multiyear highs in Japan, Germany and the U.K.
Higher bond yields can drag on stock prices and lift borrowing costs for companies and consumers across the economy.
Rising prices remain the top concern for bond traders, and continued fighting between the U.S. and Iran has done little to ease those worries. The national average price of diesel climbed to a record of $5.850 on Friday, according to AAA. That is up from $3.712 a year ago.
Investors will get more insight on the path of prices this week, with the much-awaited consumer-price index report due Friday and a reading on producer prices Thursday.
With another blockbuster earnings season in the books, some analysts have also warned that any boost from the third-quarter reports due in the coming months could be minimal. Back-to-back quarters of standout profits have raised expectations and made it especially difficult to impress traders. Custom-chip company Broadcom, for example, said Wednesday that it more than tripled its earnings and nearly doubled its revenue. Shares slipped 2.7% the next session.
Many analysts note there are plenty of reasons not to panic. The economy is in impressive shape, thanks to a healthy labor market and the rippling effects of the artificial-intelligence investment boom. Profits are booming at America’s biggest companies. The Cboe Volatility Index has dropped to its lowest levels of 2026. Credit spreads are tight, a sign bond investors aren’t concerned about economic conditions that could hurt companies.
But the mood has shifted from the euphoria that felt tangible when the Nasdaq was notching back-to-back records early this summer. The question, Mayfield said, is whether the fundamentals that have bolstered the bull market so far can stretch the rally into 2027.
“There are more anxieties or uncertainties about the backdrop,” he said. “It does feel like a transitional moment.”
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