US investigators have accused Google of short-changing female employees who do similar work to men.
A Department of Labor official has disclosed the agency's allegations during a Friday court hearing in San Francisco.
"We found systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce," testified Janette Wipper, a Labor Department regional director, according to The Guardian.
The tech giant vehemently disagrees with the charges, which the California company says it had not heard until Wipper's court appearance.
Google and other technology companies have been trying to improve hiring practices that have historically doled out most of their technical jobs to white and Asian men.
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Their efforts to strike a better balance have been mostly unsuccessful so far.
For instance, only 19 per cent of Google's technology jobs are held by women.
Overall, nearly one-third of Google's more than 70,000 workers are women.
The Labor Department's probe evolved from a lawsuit filed in January seeking to bar Google doing business with the federal government unless the company complied with an audit of its employee-compensation records.
