Bengaluru : Shreya Ukil, a 40-year-old Indian techie who took IT major Wipro to court for sacking her on grounds of gender discrimination, unequal pay and victimization, has won the landmark lawsuit in a British court.
In her lawsuit, Ukil alleged that she was paid half of what her male counterparts in London were drawing. She also said she was routinely subjected to sexist remarks by senior colleagues who called her “shrill’, ‘shallow’, ‘un-European’ and ‘bitch’ among other names. Women who are confident, capable and express their viewpoints were often called emotional and menopausal by some male peers, said Ukil. She said she was harassed, cornered and even blocked from moving to other roles in Europe.
“The Wipro leadership team, including its (then) chief executive T.K. Kurien, conspired to push Ukil out of her job and her role in Britain,” her counsel Slater Gordon said in a statement from London on Wednesday.
The court, too, observed that the direction (to sack Ukil) had come from the very top and was followed through with considerable resolve.
She had worked in the company for 10 years, won multi-million-dollar contracts for the firm and received numerous performance awards; she started raising gender concerns in 2012, which went unheeded.
Ukil sued the Bengaluru-based outsourcing firm in October 2015, seeking one million pounds compensa-tion for the gender discrimination, unequal pay and harassment.
While sacking Ukil and her superior Manoj Punja, the company had then said that they were relieved from service after an internal inquiry established that they were into a relationship but did not report about it to the company as a policy.
Ukil, who was the sales and market development manager for Wipro’s back office operations in London, filed the lawsuit with the central London employment tribunal, claiming she was forced into an affair by Punja, a married man, who was head of its business process outsourcing (BPO) office in London.
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Charges that she worked in ‘predatory and misogynistic’ culture and was forced into sleeping with her boss
London : An Indian woman employee at the London office of IT major Wipro has filed a 1 million pounds compensation case of sexual discrimination, unequal pay and unfair dismissal against the firm.
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