Apple faces setback in 2020 bias suit filed by South Asian ex-employee

Tech giant Apple Inc has failed to persuade a judge to dismiss a wrongful firing claim by a former company engineer who says she was discriminated due to her ethnic Pakistani background by two male East Asian supervisors. The case pertains to Schulze vs Apple Inc in California Superior Court, San Jose.

California state court Judge Sunil R Kulkarni on Wednesday tentatively ruled that the woman can move forward with her claim that she was fired unlawfully.

The judge ruled that although Anita Nariani Schulze had voluntarily resigned her job, she still meets the legal standard for wrongful termination due to her claim that she left only after continuous discrimination being subjected towards her, Bloomberg reported.

In her 2020 lawsuit, Schulze described herself as an Indian Hindu woman, tracing her ancestry to the Sindh region of what became part of Pakistan after the partition in 1947.

She said that one of her supervisors at Apple was an Indian Hindu, while the other was a Pakistani Muslim. She claimed that men with such background consider women as submissive, and that’s how they treated her.

Schulze accused her supervisors of constantly excluding her from meetings, criticising her unfairly, micromanaging her work, and depriving her of bonuses but awarding them to other male engineers who she supervised.

Although the judge allowed her case to move forward, he rejected Schulze’s request to represent a group of Apple engineers in similar circumstances, saying that she didn’t have standing to do so as she failed to show that any male engineer who had a similar position at Apple was earning more than she was.

“She alleges that male engineers she supervised received bonuses and restricted stock units, while plaintiff did not,” the judge wrote. “But there is no indication that the male engineers’ overall compensation was higher.”

Filed in 2020, Schulze’s lawsuit sheds light into how ethnic prejudices against minority communities can be brought up even in large tech companies, who are always on the hunt for new talent, and recruit employees from distinct cultures and backgrounds.

Edited by Rupashree Ravi

Also Read: Apple may see double-digit growth throughout 2021 in India

Also Read: Apple registered double-digit revenue growth in India in June quarter: Tim Cook