Google sued by ex-YouTube employee for ‘hiring discrimination’ against white, Asian males

Arne Wilberg, a white male who worked nine years at Google, filed a civil lawsuit saying the company pressured recruiters to look for female and Latina applicants to achieve its goal for improving diversity.

A man checks Google devices outside its booth at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on February 27, 2018. The tech giant is being sued for discrimination in its hiring policy. (Reuters)

Google has been sued by a former YouTube employee for allegedly pressuring recruiters to only look for female and Latina applicants and that the video-sharing platform had last year stopped hiring White and Asian males for technical positions.

The lawsuit claims that the tech giant would only hire people from historically under-represented groups for technical positions.

"YouTube last year stopped hiring White and Asian males for technical positions because they didn't help the world's largest video site achieve its goals for improving diversity, according to a civil lawsuit filed by a former employee," The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

Arne Wilberg, a white male, who spent nine years working at Google, had filed a civil lawsuit against Google in January.

Wilberg claimed that Google implemented "clear and irrefutable policies" meant to exclude white and Asian men in an attempt to increase the company's overall diversity.

He also claimed that the tech giant retaliated against him for opposing these policies, eventually firing him in November 2017, according to The Verge.

The lawsuit slapped on Google also targets 25 unnamed Google employees who allegedly enforced discriminatory hiring rules, quoting a number of emails and other documents.

The tech giant was sued last week by a woman software engineer alleging that it has a "bro-culture" that allowed her to be sexually harassed daily while the company did nothing to intervene.

Loretta Lee, who started working for Google in 2008 and was fired in 2016 for poor performance, filed the suit in February against Google for sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and wrongful termination in a California court.