The litigation began in 2023, after co-lead plaintiff Derek Mobley was repeatedly rejected for financial, IT help-desk and customer service jobs, often within hours of applying.
Mobley’s resume includes that he graduated from Morehouse College, an all-male historically Black college and university, and shows his extensive employment history — alleged tip-offs to his race and that he is over age 40. According to the complaint, he also suffers from anxiety and depression.
Rather than suing the companies, however, his lawyers went after Workday.
The company says its Workday Recruiting software helps customers hire new workers — but that the product is highly customizable, and it’s up to each customer to decide how to sort, review and reject job applicants.
The plaintiffs contend the software itself contributes to discriminatory outcomes.
They point to statistical evidence to argue that the Workday tools disproportionately exclude African American, female, over-40 and disabled applicants from consideration, in violation of employment discrimination laws. They claim Workday uses data on a company's existing workforce to "train" the AI to screen for the best applicants without accounting for the existing bias that it may reflect.
In 2024, US District Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco allowed the case to move forward, though she rejected claims that Workday intended the tools to be discriminatory.
However, she found that the plaintiffs plausibly alleged the challenged technology resulted in a disparate impact.
The longstanding legal theory holds that employers can be liable for discrimination if otherwise neutral employment practices disproportionately affect a protected group and cannot be justified by business necessity.
Under the Trump administration, the federal government has stopped pursuing disparate impact cases, arguing that liability should instead turn on discriminatory intent. That doesn’t bar private litigants from asserting such claims, however — nor, Lin found, does it matter if a bot rather than a person is making an employment-related decision.
“Drawing an artificial distinction between software decision-makers and human decision-makers would potentially gut anti-discrimination laws in the modern era,” the judge wrote.
WDAY•
