Google Inc. has denied allegations by the U.S. Department of Labor that it discriminates against women by paying them less than men.

The Department alleged Friday that it had found systemic compensation disparities against women across the entirety of Google’s workforce and that it had “received compelling evidence of very significant discrimination against women in the most common positions at Google headquarters.” This is despite the fact that it also claimed that Google had refused a request by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs to see further data and documentation.

Google is legally obliged to provide employment data to the OFCCP as it has contracts with government agencies. However, Google argued that providing all the data breaches privacy laws. In a post to The Keyword blog, Google Vice President of People Operations Eileen Naughton (pictured) said that the company was surprised when a representative of the OFCCP accused the company of not compensating women fairly.

“We were taken aback by this assertion, which came without any supporting data or methodology,” Naughton stated. “The OFCCP representative claimed to have reached this conclusion even as the OFCCP is seeking thousands of employee records, including contact details of our employees, in addition to the hundreds of thousands of documents we’ve already produced in response to 18 different document requests.”

Naughton subsequently highlighted ways that Google makes sure that it doesn’t pay women less than men in the same role, including an annual analysis that is described as “extremely scientific and robust” and annual compensation reviews that are based on role, job level, job location as well as current and recent performance ratings. Those ratings, the company said, are “blind” to gender, with the analysts calculating suggested amounts never knowing whether the employee is male or female.

“Our analysis gives us confidence that there is no gender pay gap at Google,” she concluded. “In fact, we recently expanded the analysis to cover race in the U.S.”

Google is not the first tech company to be called out for alleged discriminatory practices by the OFCCP. Big data analytics firm Palantir Technologies Inc. previously was targeted by the department over allegations that it discriminated against Asians in its hiring practices, despite the fact that 36 percent of its workforce was Asian while Asians consisted of only 5.6 percent of the overall U.S. population.

Photo: Google UK via YouTube