Saudi Arabia’s fledgling advertising industry and continued growth in the sector in the United Arab Emirates are helping to make the marketing business in the Middle East the fastest-growing in the world.

Ad spending in the Middle East is projected to increase 8.1% to $6.6 billion this year, up from 3.5% last year, according to advertising research firm WARC.

That expansion is building from a much smaller base than in many other ad markets. The Netherlands alone will generate $6 billion in ad spending in 2024, up about 2.3%, WARC said. But it is also enough to outpace every other region in 2024, the firm said.

“It reminds me almost of the gold rush,” said Reda Raad , chief executive of TBWA\Raad Group, an ad agency based in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, that is part of the U.S.-based ad holding company Omnicom Group . “I don’t think we’re going to see this type of growth again in our lifetime.” TBWA\Raad has won eight new clients over the past year, with an increase in head count of 17% to accommodate the new work, Raad said.

Some international brands have long maintained a presence in the region. PepsiCo has considered the area a strategic market for decades, said Karim Elfiqi , senior vice president and chief marketing officer at PepsiCo Africa, Middle East and South Asia. Sponsorship deals with local stars such as Mohamed Salah , a soccer player from Egypt, “are a testimony of how over time, we have been part of the cultural fabric of the region,” Elfiqi said.

Other major brands have formed a more recent focus on the Middle East. The Lego Group opened a Middle East and Africa headquarters in Dubai in 2019, citing the size of the region’s young population. That office has developed work such as a Ramadan-themed campaign that ran in the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia, among other locations.

‘Massive growth’

The Middle East’s ad market has lagged behind regions such as North America and Europe partly because of stricter cultural norms and regulations that affected business, as did a more limited media landscape and economic instability, according to Raad.

But marketing growth in the region is now being driven in part by newfound marketing interest in Saudi Arabia, where ad spending this year is expected to reach $2.1 billion, nearly double its level in 2019, according to WARC. Growth is also coming from the U.A.E., whose ad market is expected to reach $1.7 billion in 2024. Smaller contributors include Qatar and Kuwait.

The landscape has changed now because of economic diversification, increased connectivity and a move into the digital world, leading international brands to enter and invest in campaigns tailored to the region, Raad said.

Four years ago, Saudi Arabia made up a small proportion of business at Lightblue, a creative experience and tech agency based in Dubai. These days, 40% of its business comes from the country, says co-founder David Balfour , who opened an office in Riyadh last month as a result.

“The conversation used to be, ‘We’re going to do this in Dubai.’ Now, it’s ‘We’re going to do this in Dubai—and in Saudi.’” Balfour said. “We’re seeing massive growth in that region.”

There have been speed bumps. As government spending reaches huge levels , Saudi Arabia experienced a rare economic contraction in 2023.

But the country’s efforts to expand its economic pursuits beyond oil have led to the creation of new brands, which are seeking the help of marketing agencies to get the word out.

Marketers in the region are seeking help to stay on-trend in areas such as generative artificial intelligence and social media, said Greg Paull , principal of R3, a consulting firm that helps match advertisers with agencies.

“U.A.E. has been a magnet for the region for 20 years as more investment has come in—but with the new leadership in Saudi since 2017 [when Mohammed bin Salman was named crown prince ], this market has gone through remarkable growth,” Paull said.

Saudi Arabia has faced criticism for its human-rights record under the crown prince, the day-to-day ruler of the kingdom, especially over the 2018 killing of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the more recent jailing of women’s rights activists.

Mohammed has outlasted the international isolation that followed Khashoggi’s killing, however, and continues to pursue an economic diversification plan dubbed Vision 2030. The country last year unveiled plans for a new international airline called Riyadh Air, is investing billions of dollars to build its tourism and videogame industries, and in March hosted a golf tournament in Jeddah under the auspices of LIV Golf, the Saudi-backed league that has both challenged the PGA Tour and struck a deal to unify with it.

Changing tides

Vision 2030 also calls women’s empowerment a top social priority and seeks to increase the country’s employment rate of women.

Nada Hakeem , CEO and co-founder of Saudi creative agency Wetheloft, said the perceptions of hardships for women in the marketing and advertising industry are outdated and inaccurate.

“As a Saudi woman who founded my company in 2012, I’ve always felt supported by the creative community and the industry as a whole,” Hakeem said. “While every society may have its challenges, I can confidently say that these challenges have not hindered our growth.”

A progression of new laws, policies and incentives are making the industry in Saudi Arabia more inclusive and supportive for women, she added.

In certain parts of the Middle East, “absolutely, it’s still challenging, but they are making the right strides, and they have the right quotas and ambitions in place,” said Rebecca Bezzina , CEO for the EMEA region at R/GA, an agency owned by Interpublic Group of Cos.

“They’ve got wealth, they’ve got world-class ambition, world-class budget. They’re not shy of doing things in the right way,” Bezzina added, speaking of the region overall. “But they still have a talent shortage, especially from a creative and design and product point of view. So often what we’ve found our success has been that they’ve come to us and said, ‘Oh, we want a world-class agency to help us launch this new venture or do this new brand.’”

R/GA said it sees 69% more requests for agency work from marketers in the region today than it did five years ago. It recently handled a brand redesign for Banque Saudi Fransi, which wanted to reaffirm its Saudi roots with a modern identity, and created Weyay, the brand for a new digital bank from the National Bank of Kuwait.

The agency hasn’t notably increased its regional workforce, but it has made changes to facilitate working across Europe and the Middle East.

Other Western players are making moves to capture a piece of the growth. Advertising giant WPP has long worked in Saudi Arabia through units such as Ogilvy and GroupM, but in 2021 established a joint venture with a local company to create ICG Saudi Arabia, a communications and media company based in Saudi Arabia. Ad holding company Stagwell opened new offices for its media agency Assembly in Riyadh in 2021 and in Cairo in 2022.

Regional hospitality

Some executives said certain facets of business dealings in the Middle East are different than in other parts of the world.

Bertrand Morin, a group account director for R/GA who is based in London and works often with Middle Eastern clients, said he spends much more time speaking about personal lives and families with those clients than those in the U.K. or U.S. He has been invited to Middle Eastern clients’ homes to join their families for dinner, something that has never happened with clients elsewhere.

But others say it can feel surprisingly familiar.

Balfour, the Lightblue co-founder, said he was struck by the number of ad-agency workers recently having dinner at the Riyadh location of steakhouse chain Beefbar, and the scene’s similarity to far-off locations.

“The staff are from everywhere in the world. The service and the food is unbelievable. There’s a DJ playing,” Balfour said. “Apart from not having alcohol, you could be anywhere in the world.”

We don’t want to be friends with our co-workers . We don’t want to help out with that project. We don’t trust the CEO…or our boss…or that guy in accounting.

Have we taken our cynicism at work too far?

In some ways, our bad attitude makes sense. Many of us made work our church, only to end up laid off , burned out or underpaid. Now we check out, do less, gossip and snark.

It isn’t getting us anywhere good, according to Jamil Zaki , a Stanford University psychology professor who runs the school’s social neuroscience lab.

“Cynicism, if it were a pill, would really be a poison,” he says.

Zaki has spent years researching sunny concepts such as empathy and compassion. One of his studies, for example, found that giving away money activates a similar part of the brain as eating chocolate. His forthcoming book, “Hope for Cynics,” explores the rise of our darker sides, our belief that other people are selfish, greedy and dishonest.

Betrayed once, we practice what Zaki calls “pre-disappointment,” always assuming others will let us down. The mindset feels productive and cunning, like we’ll be able to protect ourselves. But Zaki says it can actually stunt our careers in the long run, and hurt our mental and physical health.

“By never trusting, cynics never lose,” he writes. “They also never win.”

He assures that you don’t have to become the company cheerleader, or even an optimist, to grow your faith in other people. You do have to take a chance on them, examining your own assumptions and suspending your conviction that you already know how this is going to turn out (not well).

While the approach might initially seem blasphemous to the more negative, sarcastic and skeptical among us—like, say, me—anyone can become less cynical , he says.

You might even find you like it.

How we got here

Once upon a time, Americans were less cynical, Zaki says. A longstanding survey from research organisation NORC at the University of Chicago, which has examined American attitudes since 1972, shows we used to trust each other more. Around the middle of the last century, many hummed along on the rosy glow of plum benefits, robust job security and the knowledge that the chief executive was making, say, 20 times a worker’s pay, instead of 200.

It isn’t that we never complained about work, but Zaki says we repaid our companies’ loyalty with commitment, as part of an unspoken covenant.

Today, that employee-employer pact can feel like a relic of a bygone era. Workers have swapped pensions and equity in their companies for more meagre benefits that put the risk and onus on individuals. Instead of reporting to paternalistic employers, many people now operate under tenuous contracts and gig work.

Some of us work from home in isolation or spend lonely days in the office trapped on back-to-back video calls. There’s less chitchat, less interaction.

“We don’t like people when they’re abstracted,” Zaki says, “but we love people who we actually know.”

Zaki understands why, given all this, we might scoff at the notion that our company is a family, or roll our eyes at the prospect of joining in forced fun at the office happy hour.

Sometimes, I suspect, we also adopt a toughness because we don’t want to look like we’re trying too hard, only to fail or be rejected. Maybe it stems from perfectionism, or anxiety, or insecurity after being exposed to everyone else’s highlight reel on social media for the past 15 years.

Fighting our own worst tendencies

It might seem like all the office snakes are scaling the ladder, but Zaki says studies show cynics’ earnings and leadership potential level off with time. To do good work and attain success, you have to build alliances and share information. Translation: You have to trust someone.

Cynics are prone to poor health, from depression to heart disease, he says, adding that at an organisational level, cynicism can lead to pervasive backstabbing, higher turnover and even corporate corruption.

Cynicism is also a self-fulfilling prophecy, he says. People often mirror how we treat them. Micromanage your team—surveilling them and wresting away their ability to make decisions—and they’ll become the slackers you think they are, doing the bare minimum and buying mouse jigglers to mask time away from their home computers.

“Cynics tell a story full of villains and end up living in it,” he writes.

Resisting cynicism’s pull starts with being open-minded. Examine the data of your life like a scientist would, he says, instead of jumping to conclusions, positive or negative. Think everyone at your job is out for themselves? Ask 10 colleagues for a favour, and see if anyone agrees to help. Convinced every conversation with a co-worker will be painful? Spend a day rating your interactions with them on a scale from 1 to 10.

Challenging your assumptions will leave you pleasantly surprised, Zaki promises, because people often rise to the occasion when we let them. You can start by doling out what you hope to receive. Try engaging in “positive gossip,” speaking highly of others. Take a leap of faith in someone, and do it obviously.

“I trust you,” a manager might say to her direct report. “I really think you can do this.”

Calibrating our hope

Could all this make us too soft? Rejecting cynicism doesn’t mean you can’t hold workers to high standards, Zaki says. Just don’t pit them against each other, with practices like stack rankings, where collaboration is discouraged as workers try to claw above each other on a scoreboard.

Your humour can still be irreverent, even biting, he adds, but jokes should ultimately bring people together or improve something.

“Snark, in the absence of any hope, kind of curdles,” he says.

And don’t be blindly optimistic, he adds. If leadership isn’t giving you any reason to have faith in them, don’t. Find another group to trust—maybe your small team or a union. Band together to provide a buffer to the daily stress of working in your organisation, or enact change by fighting for something better.

“We often underestimate how much influence we have,” he says. “Own that power.”

Apparel retailers are discovering that weight loss is their gain.

While blockbuster drugs like Ozempic that lead to significant weight loss have dented demand for diet plans and caused food companies to prepare for people eating less, clothing sellers are finding that millions of slimmed-down Americans want to buy new clothes.

The newly svelte aren’t just restocking their wardrobes, many are also gravitating to more body-hugging shapes and risqué designs, according to industry executives and shoppers. Some brands are responding by replacing zippers with adjustable corsets and adding more sheer looks.

The nascent downsizing is happening across brands and types of garments. Industry executives said that they can’t be certain weight-loss medicine is the cause, but added that the shift is unlike anything they have seen. It is also an about-face from recent years, when many retailers rushed to add larger sizes to accommodate Americans’ growing girth.

About 5% of Lafayette 148’s customers are buying new outfits because they have lost weight, often replacing their size 12 clothes with size 6 or 8, according to Deirdre Quinn , the brand’s chief executive. The benefit is twofold; in addition to boosting sales, Lafayette 148 is saving money because smaller sizes use less fabric, Quinn said.

More customers of clothing rental company Rent the Runway are switching to smaller sizes than at any time in the past 15 years, said Jennifer Hyman , co-founder and CEO. These customers are also showing more of a willingness to experiment with different styles such as cutouts and other body-baring features. “When you are more comfortable in your skin, you are more willing to try edgier looks,” she said.

For Maggie Rezek, getting dressed used to be about hiding her extra weight in oversize shirts and baggy pants. Since she lost 60 pounds on semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic, the 32-year-old, who handles marketing for a beauty salon, has splurged on a new wardrobe. Now, her staples consist of crop tops and jean shorts. She has traded in her sneakers for kitten heels. She even documents her outfits on social media.

“Before, I was insecure about my body,” said Rezek, who lives in Indianapolis. “Now, I feel like I fit better in clothes. That gives me the confidence to dress up and be more stylish.”

Some 15.5 million people, or 6% of U.S. adults, say they have tried injectable weight loss drugs to slim down, according to a survey of more than 5,500 Americans conducted in March by polling company Gallup. Nearly three-quarters of current users said the drugs—a class known as GLP-1 that were originally developed to treat diabetes—are effective or extremely effective in helping them shed pounds.

Weight-loss drugs don’t work for everyone and the cost can sometimes exceed $1,000 a month, limiting the market. The full price isn’t always covered by insurance. Moreover, people struggle to keep the weight off once they stop using the drugs.

Still, some companies expect the market for these drugs will be big enough that they are shifting course. WW International , formerly known as Weight Watchers, acquired a subscription service that offers telehealth visits with doctors who can prescribe drugs like Ozempic. Nestlé is introducing a new food line this year designed for people taking weight-loss medication.

Clothing companies could use a boost. Apparel sales fell 4% in the 12 months that ended in April compared with the same period a year earlier, according to market research firm Circana, as people give priority to their spending on necessities.

Coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic, Amarra, which sells evening gowns and other formal wear in 800 retailers in the U.S., Canada and Australia, saw increased demand for larger sizes. Now, that trend has reversed.

“Over the past year, our retailers have been telling us they need smaller sizes,” said Abhi Madan, Amarra’s co-founder and creative director. Amarra, which is based in Freehold, N.J., has added sizes as small as 000. He says he is also selling more sizes in the 0-8 range and fewer in the plus-size range of 18-24.

Madan said the shift is changing the way Amarra designs dresses. It is replacing zippers with lace-up corsets, which can more easily accommodate shifting weights because the laces can be tightened or loosened. It is also adding more sheer side panels that give a figure-hugging look.

AllStar Logo, which sells polo shirts, fleece jackets and other gear to large companies, has seen demand for its largest sizes fall by half over the past year, according to Edmond Moss , its sales director.

“We used to sell a lot of fleece jackets in extra, extra large,” Moss said. “Now everything has gone down by at least one size.”

Sales of the three largest sizes of women’s button-down shirts fell 10.9% in the first three months of 2024 compared with the same period in 2022 at a dozen brands, according to Impact Analytics, which helps retailers manage their inventory and size allocations.

Sales of those same button-down shirts in the three smallest sizes grew 12.1% over that period. Impact Analytics analysed purchases in physical stores located on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It focused its research on this area because it has the highest concentration of individuals in New York City taking these drugs specifically for weight loss, according to market research firm Trilliant Health.

A similar trend played out for women’s dresses and sweaters, as well as men’s polo shirts, sweatshirts and T-shirts, according to Impact Analytics.

Prashant Agrawal , Impact Analytics’ founder and CEO, said it wasn’t possible to know if the size changes resulted from people losing weight or a shift in clothing styles, but added that such a pronounced shift is unusual. “It’s not something we’ve seen before,” he said.

Some executives are worried that the shift could reduce demand for plus-size clothes.

“I’m trying to figure out what we have to worry about in the future,” said Doug Wood , the chief executive of clothing retailer Tommy Bahama, noting that as more people lose weight it could hurt sales of its “Big & Tall” collection designed for very large men.

Jillian Sterba went from a size 6 to a size 10 after the birth of her child. When the weight didn’t come off with diet and exercise, she started injections of semaglutide in October. Since then, Sterba, who is 36 and lives in Austin, has lost 35 pounds. She is now a size 4. “Almost half my clothes are not wearable,” she said.

She bought new jeans, tops, bras and underwear. “I had been wearing flowy tops before but now I’m wearing fitted shirts,” she said. Still, Sterba said she is keeping 80% of her old clothes just in case she gains back the weight.

My memory of when I first learned about stocks is fuzzy. I was in my early 20s, and my mother sat me down at our kitchen table, helped me open a brokerage account, and showed me how to buy and sell on the platform. The lesson I walked away with: Tread carefully, invest only “play money,” not money you need to survive, and only target companies that sell resources.

I also thought: This is too risky; I’ll never touch this account.

Years later, I still approach stocks with trepidation—no doubt coloured by that 30-minute conversation with my mom.

As I’ve talked to my family and friends, I realize that so much of what we know about personal finance—how we invest, how we spend—comes from our parents.

“We get our money personalities from our childhood,” says financial planner Angela Dorsey of Dorsey Wealth Management. “So if in our childhood there was a lot of hesitancy around it, then that shapes how you feel about money and taking calculated risks.”

Learning by watching

Sometimes, these lessons are learned through specific conversations, like the one I had with my mother. But more often than not, they come simply through observing. In fact, Dorsey says that many of her clients don’t have any money conversations with their parents. “It comes from seeing what happened to their parents, seeing what happened to their uncle,” she says. “A lot of times, they’re not even aware of it.”

But that lack of awareness comes with a price: When people don’t know where their money habits come from, they can often undermine good intentions. You may want to invest and spend wisely, but these unconscious, ingrained tendencies can create financial problems down the road. So it’s useful to uncover those unspoken lessons, and figure out which ones serve us well—and which ones don’t.

To expose those habits, Dorsey offers her clients a money-personality quiz, which can unveil attitudes about money developed from childhood. So I decided to take one. For good measure, I had my sister take it as well.

Both of us ended up falling into the “Bon vivant” pool—with traits like “Workaholics with long hours” and “Spends money on anything that saves them time.” Our issues? “Ad hoc investments,” “Panic with market ups and downs,” and “Confuse hobbies with investments.” (We both really felt that last one.)

Looking back, the traits that mark my financial personality are pretty much the same traits that my parents had. They worked long hours. They did give priority to spending on things that saved them time. They were happy to buy me new books or help me tackle a new hobby or skill. New clothes or makeup? Not so much.

Unlearning some lessons

Friends I spoke with mostly echoed what my sister and I experienced. While their parents might not have given them specific advice, they did influence their spending and budgeting tendencies just by being who they were.

“I didn’t get any money lessons from my parents, but I certainly picked up habits,” a former co-worker told me. “I saw my dad pack lunch every day for work, so I pack lunch every day for work now.” This friend was particularly thrifty in my years working with her, primarily using a debit card so as to not carry debt and eating her packed lunches as the rest of us spent $15 on salads and sandwiches.

She now has a credit card, but to this day she’d rather cobble together a lunch of office snacks than go out to buy lunch. “It has helped me in the long run because it keeps a baseline of healthy spending habits,” she says. She prefers meals out as a conscious choice for special occasions, rather than a standard practice.

Another friend watched how his parents, who were small-business owners, scrimped and saved at home. He summed up what he learned from that in three bullet points:

He says he is now trying to loosen up and feel comfortable spending some of his hard-earned money to improve his quality of life, especially as he has become more successful in his career.

This is a common lesson Dorsey says she teaches her clients to unlearn. “It’s really interesting how frequently I run into situations where they have enough, but when it comes time to spending, they’re terrified,” she says. “And so I have to tell them, ‘You have my permission to spend your money.’ ”

On the brink of burnout

For my part, I’ve certainly benefited from watching my parents’ work ethic over the years. Doing so gave me the drive to establish my own career goals. Seeing their productivity inspired my own. But in the past few years, I’ve found myself on the brink of burnout—both at work and with all my extracurricular activities.

That has led me to the realization that my work and personal lives could actually benefit more from me enjoying my weekends, and not always packing them full of events or extra work. I now know that it’s just as important to step back from things and take a moment to recharge as it is to charge ahead. And my wallet would certainly appreciate buying less crochet yarn and concert tickets.

Mostly, though, I’ve had to work to get over my stock-market fears. My mother sitting down to explain how the market works was more than what some of my friends learned from their parents. But while it was a well-intentioned lesson, it didn’t have the desired effect at the time.

As a more fully-formed adult, I began to rethink that conversation. And thanks to my colleagues and my friends, I’ve started to put money into something beyond a basic savings account. I began contributing to a Roth IRA after a friend explained the tax benefits. A former boss clued me into high-yield savings accounts. A colleague encouraged me to invest—but in more-diversified ways, such as ETFs.

And I finally logged into that brokerage account my mother helped me open. While I still veer toward the more risk-averse side, following my mother’s cautious footsteps, learning more on my own has allowed me to think of investing as a way to make my savings grow, not just a way to experiment with “play money.”

In the end, sometimes the most well-intentioned parental lessons backfire. One friend invested in specific mutual funds that his father recommended. But those mutual funds didn’t do well and started dropping in value. So when my friend was later eligible to contribute to his employer-sponsored retirement account, he chose not to—feeling burned by those earlier losses. Instead, he used his extra money to be able to live without a roommate.

While my friend eventually ended up contributing to a retirement plan, he says the earlier experience taught him that sometimes you just need to “reject the things your parents tell you to do.”

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.