Quote: In 2018, Israel’s team produced an internal report that found large racial disparities in rates of “involuntary terminations” at Cognizant over the first eight months of the year. Black employees were let go at a rate 23 times that of Asian workers, the data showed. For Hispanic or Latino employees, the rate was 16 times the rate of their Asian counterparts. For White workers, it was eight times as high. (The Asian workers were overwhelmingly from India and were working on visas, according to the report.) Israel told the jury that those were some of the most extreme racial disparities she’d ever seen. She also said that when she reached out to Cognizant’s hiring managers with those findings, her supervisor told her to stop sharing the data beyond HR leaders.
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(Editor’s note: During the reporting of this story, a representative for Cognizant repeatedly asked Bloomberg to disclose its own H-1B data. Since 2009, when the US government began disclosing the numbers, Bloomberg has successfully sponsored 3,082 new H-1B visa petitions, according to the most recent data from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.)
