"I've seen damages ranging from as little as tens of thousands of dollars to monetary awards in the tens of millions," Igasaki says. "It depends on the kind of discrimination we find and how overt it is. There's also the legal costs involved, not to mention the damage done to a company's name. If a company is selling a product to the public and suddenly that company is in the headlines for a charge of discrimination, I'd have to imagine that's going to hurt its image."
Typically, the EEOC is eager to settle cases out of court with companies it sues. For one thing, discrimination is difficult to prove; in addition, a legal imbroglio eats up resources, a prime consideration at an agency that must investigate at least 80,000 employment discrimination cases a year. "The idea is to resolve as many cases as possible, so the odds are always good that we'll settle a case," says the off-the-record EEOC source quoted earlier. "But in the case of the technology field, we wouldn't want to settle out of court. We would want press coverage. We would want people throughout the industry to notice we're here." When asked to comment about that statement, Igasaki would only say that "every suit will be looked at on a case-by-case basis."
Some might say Igasaki's office is guilty of grandstanding. Just as the suit against Microsoft immeasurably raised the profile of the antitrust division of the Justice Department, maybe a few high-profile employment discrimination cases would do the same for the EEOC. "Nothing would make us happier than to find out there's no discrimination in the high-tech field," Igasaki says. "We'd love to be proven wrong. But, let me add I also don't believe, based both on prior experience and through our investigation so far, that we're going to find that this is an industry above discrimination."
Even after a year of fact-finding, Igasaki is reluctant to elaborate further. "There's certainly a problem," he says. "There's a general lack of diversity that's obviously widespread. Yet whether that indicates there's discrimination remains to be seen. We don't assume just because there's a disparity that there's not a good reason for that disparity. So I'd say there's ample reason for concern when looking at the high-technology field - but it's hard to say how much of that is due to actual discrimination."
The term "high-technology field" seems only slightly less moldy than "information superhighway." But Igasaki seems nonplussed when asked if he really knows enough about this world to pass judgement. "I may not know much about technology," he says, "but we don't know much about making cars, either. Yet we go after the auto industry when we see employment discrimination. We know hiring. We know discrimination. And that's what we look for."
