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Comment by chollida1 | Hacker News Reader

I've got a question on lawsuits like this for the lawyers here.

How exactly would these women prove their case? From what I've read it seems like their case doesn't have any actual "smoking gun" like an email from one of their bosses saying they weren't promoted due to being women.

All the "evidence" seems to be someone thought that they started at too low of a level or they weren't promoted when they felt like they should have been.

In cases like this do you launch the lawsuit and then demand google hand over data so you can find what you are looking for? Or are their belief's/accusations enough to go to court with?

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There's this:

"The suit cites data from a 2015 review of Google’s employment practices by the U.S. Department of Labor’s contract compliance unit that’s the subject of a separate federal administrative complaint against the company. The agency performed a statistical regression analysis of the pay for roughly 21,000 employees at the company’s Mountain View office for 2015, according to the complaint. The analysis “found systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce," according to the suit."

Obviously not specific to these 3 women, but it does seem to be based on "data" and not anecdotes.

Actually there's a lot of Google's own data to backup this claim: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/technology/google-salarie...

But that's not "Google's data" in that it was something anyone could add to and was in no way audited.

or put another way, anytime a salary survey is posted on hacker news the first 20+ comments are about how its bogus and sure enough the data seems to back it up with people claiming $300/year salaries and $50,000,000 salaries.

You get enough evidence to get over the "they literally have nothing" response from the company -- which doesn't take much -- and then you get into discovery, where you can subpoena company records that support your case.

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