Explained: The ‘culture of bias’ at Infosys which stopped women and Indians from being hired

The troubles don’t stop for Infosys. The Bengaluru-based IT giant is facing a bias suit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York after a former executive accused the company of being discriminatory in its hiring process — based on age, gender and nationality. What’s the case all about? Jill Prejean, former vice president of talent acquisition with Infosys , says she was hired by the behemoth in 2018 at the age of 59 to find workers for its $1 billion-a-year consulting division. In her complaint, which she filed in September last year against former Infosys partners Jerry Kurtz and Dan Albright and former head of consulting, Mark Livingston, she alleges that she found that there was a “rampant culture of illegal discriminatory animus among the partner level executives based on age, gender and caregiver status”. She added that it was a result of these biases that she lost her job too. In her complaint, Prejean says that she tried to “change this culture within the first two months of her employment” but was met with resistance from Infosys partners — Jerry Kurtz and Dan Albright, who became hostile in the face of her objections and sought to “circumvent her authority in order to evade compliance with the law” when she met with them to establish at Infosys’s hiring needs and preferences. She alleges that she was consistently told by Infosys partners or executives that they preferred not to hire consultants of Indian origin, wanted women without children at home, and candidates less than the age of 50. The complaint goes on to claim that when a new supervisor, Infosys’s former head of consulting, Mark Livingston, was hired, she “received an order to institute such unlawful hiring criteria,” and that her objections “resulted in a direct and immediate threat to her job, and ultimately did cost her job.” Prejean alleges that Livingston demanded that she should “not put forward candidates for jobs who were over 50 years of age and women who had children at home.” In her complaint, she claims that Livingston, who supervised her, would “get angry and raise his voice” when she refused to make “prohibited, discriminatory inquiries of candidates”; that he “treated her like a secretary”; and that he vetoed the hiring of a “highly qualified female candidate because of one comment from a man.” When Prejean resisted the discriminatory practices, she was told she could lose her job and constantly faced harassment from the executives, she wrote in her complaint. In fact, when she complained to human resources against Livingston, Prejean claims she was unceremoniously sacked. She has claimed significant economic loss, emotional distress, humiliation, insomnia, anxiety and depression due to these alleged unlawful acts by the company and its executives. Infosys has rejected the claims and also filed a motion to dismiss the suit, which has now been rejected by the US court. Instead the court has asked the defendants to file their answer within 21 days. When Infosys was accused of bias This isn’t the first allegation of bias that the IT giant is facing. In January 2021, four former Infosys employees charged that the Indian IT consulting firm discriminated against them because they were women. The complaint alleged that a male Infosys executive had admitted the company discriminates against women in American offices because male employees “have families to support,” whereas “women have husbands to support them”, reported Business Insider. Bias in the IT industry Past and present employees in the IT sector have repeatedly spoken of a bias in their industry. Research carried out by CoderPad, a candidate assessment platform, in early 2022 revealed that almost 65 per cent of workers within the industry, including recruiters, said bias was an issue in tech recruitment. In March 2020, five US-based former employees of Wipro filed a class action suit against the Bengaluru-headquartered company alleging “discriminatory employment practices” based on race and nationality. According to the suit, the five former employees of Wipro, Gregory MacLean, Rick Valles, Ardeshir Pezeshki, James Gibbs and Ronald Hemenway, alleged “discrimination” against who are not of South Asian and Indian origin. Google has also faced allegations of bias and discrimination. In March, a lawsuit was filed against the tech giant, accusing it of systemic racial bias against Black employees. According to the plaintiff, April Curley, the company steered Black employees to lower-level jobs, paid them less and denied them opportunities to advance because of their race. In 2015, cases were filed against tech giant Microsoft for discrimination based on gender and nationality. A 2021 report from the academic publishing giant Wiley shows that diversity hiring is still a major issue in IT companies. The report said that 68 per cent of business leaders in the sector found that there was a lack of diversity in their workforce. Moreover, a survey of 2,030 workers between the ages of 18 and 28 conducted in the US in July 2021, found that 50 per cent said they had left or wanted to leave a tech or IT job “because the company culture made them feel unwelcome or uncomfortable”. With inputs from agencies Read all the Latest News , Trending News , Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.