The Second-Largest Payment Processor on Earth Ran a Two-Tier Payroll for Years

Mastercard sits at the center of the global financial system, handling billions of transactions daily between merchants, banks, and cardholders. In 2023 it pulled in more than $25 billion in revenue. Inside that company, the complaint alleges, a different kind of transaction was happening every time a woman, a Black employee, or a Hispanic employee was hired.

• Mastercard’s business is organized around a 12-level career hierarchy. Level 1 holds C-suite and officer positions; Level 12 is entry-level. Every employee’s salary, bonus, and equity award is anchored to their assigned Career Level, with set ranges for minimums, midpoints, and maximums.
• The company applies this same career-level structure across all business units and all geographic locations in the United States, making it a single, unified compensation engine for every worker nationwide.
• Mastercard does not include Career Level designations in its external job postings, meaning candidates have no visibility into where they are being placed in the pay structure before accepting an offer.
• The complaint covers Career Levels 4 through 10, which spans everyone from junior analysts to senior managers and directors, the largest swath of the company’s workforce.
• Employees at adjacent levels are alleged to perform the same or substantially similar duties regardless of their assigned level. The label, the complaint argues, does not reflect real differences in work; it reflects who was doing the labeling and whom they were labeling.

• Pay inequity compounds with time because raises and promotions are calculated as percentages of the current salary. A worker who starts underpaid never catches up unless the company takes specific corrective action, which the complaint alleges Mastercard systematically failed to do.
• The complaint explicitly states Mastercard had knowledge that its facially neutral leveling and compensation practices produced a disproportionate negative impact on Black, Hispanic, and female employees, and continued to use them anyway.
• Mastercard failed to “comprehensively evaluate and continuously validate” the factors used to assign Career Levels, including after new roles were created and companies were acquired, meaning the system degraded further over time without correction.

What a Number on a Pay Stub Actually Takes From a Person

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being told, implicitly, that your work is worth less. It does not announce itself loudly. It shows up in small, precise moments: when you ask for a title that matches your responsibilities and are told you are not quite there yet; when you watch a colleague with fewer years and thinner credentials get handed the level you were denied; when you access an internal salary guide and see in black and white that the company already knows it is underpaying you.

G.A. Gomes lived that moment. She started at Mastercard as a contractor in 2016, spending two years proving herself in the building before being hired as a full employee in 2018. The company did not reward those two years with a better title or a higher starting salary. She was placed at the same compensation level she had held as an outside contractor. Then, a year after she was promoted to Manager, Mastercard conducted an internal compensation analysis and informed her that she had in fact been undercompensated. They raised her salary by $20,000. This was Mastercard admitting, in writing and in dollars, that the system had shortchanged her. She took the raise. Then she opened the internal leveling guidelines and read them carefully. Even with the correction, she was still earning less than white male employees performing equal work. The $20,000 was not restitution. It was a partial acknowledgment of a much larger debt the company had no intention of fully paying.

Deborah Hayman accepted an offer letter from Mastercard after the company acquired her employer in 2019. The letter said she was an Analyst at Career Level 8. What it did not say was that she would be expected to perform managerial work that belonged to the level above hers. She figured this out quickly. Her skills, her work, and her output were Level 7. Her paycheck was Level 8. She left in 2021, citing the search for a role where she would be compensated fairly. That sentence from the complaint is quiet and devastating: she did not quit because she disliked the work; she quit because the company refused to pay her what the work was worth.

L. Kasomo came in with an MBA. She asked to be placed at Career Level 5, a Director position, based on her education and experience. Mastercard placed her at Career Level 6, a Manager position, instead. During that same hiring period, the company brought in at least one white male employee with comparable experience at the Director level she had requested. She was terminated in October 2024. She spent two and a half years in a role she was overqualified for, paid at a rate calibrated to that lower label, while a comparator with similar credentials walked in at the higher rung from day one.

S. Brown worked at Mastercard from 2017 to 2020. He received excellent reviews. He accumulated accomplishments. He was passed over for promotion. During that same stretch, white Analysts with fewer qualifications were elevated to Senior Analyst at Career Level 7. Brown stayed at Career Level 8. He left in 2020, and the complaint states plainly that he left “largely because of the lack of opportunity for advancement and promotion based on his race.” Three years of his career were spent being assessed as less-than by a system that the company allegedly knew was broken and chose not to fix.

These are four people. The class has more than 7,500 members. Each of those 7,500 was assigned a number. The number was not neutral. It was the product of a process that the company ran without adequate validation, that it acknowledged was producing discriminatory results, and that it maintained anyway. The settlement is $26 million. Spread across 7,500 workers, across years of lost wages, suppressed promotions, and compounded inequity, that number is not justice. It is the price Mastercard calculated it could pay to make this stop.

What the Complaint Actually Says, Word for Word

These are verbatim statements from the class action complaint filed January 14, 2025, in the Southern District of New York (Case 7:25-cv-00340). Nothing below has been paraphrased or invented.

“Mastercard maintained uniform compensation, leveling, and promotion policies and practices that resulted in the disproportionate underpayment of female, Black, and Hispanic employees as compared to their similarly-situated male and white counterparts.”

“In 2023, Mastercard’s median pay for Black and Hispanic employees relative to white employees in the U.S. was 94.3%. In that same year, Mastercard’s median pay for female relative to male employees globally was 96.4%.”

“Upon information and belief, despite Mastercard’s knowledge that these facially-neutral leveling and compensation policies and practices resulted in a disproportionate negative impact on the compensation of female, Black, and Hispanic employees compared to their male and white counterparts, Mastercard continued to employ these policies.”

“Mastercard’s under-leveling of Plaintiff Gomes at hire and undercompensating her has contributed to Plaintiff Gomes being paid less than male and white comparators.”

“Mastercard failed to promote Plaintiff Brown despite his accomplishments, qualifications, and excellent reviews, and continued to under-level him in a Career Level 8 position, while promoting other less-qualified white Analysts to the Senior Analyst position at a Career Level 7.”

“During this time period, Mastercard hired at least one white, male employee with comparable experience in a Career Level 5 Director role.”

What Systemic Pay Discrimination Costs Beyond the Individual Paycheck

Public Health

Financial insecurity generated by wage suppression has documented connections to physical and mental health outcomes across research literature. The specific mechanisms alleged in this case create compounded harm.

• Black and Hispanic workers facing systematic underpayment have reduced capacity to build emergency savings, maintain health insurance out-of-pocket, or absorb medical costs not covered by employer plans. Over a multi-year career, this gap in financial cushion translates directly into deferred medical care and elevated chronic stress loads.
• The complaint specifically cites emotional distress, humiliation, embarrassment, and anguish as documented non-economic damages suffered by the plaintiffs and class members. These are not incidental; they are recognized legal harms alongside the lost wages, and they reflect the sustained psychological cost of knowing your employer has assessed your work as worth less based on who you are.
• S. Brown left his job in 2020 citing the racial promotion block as the primary reason. Involuntary or forced job exits driven by discrimination disrupt benefits continuity, including health coverage, retirement contributions, and paid leave accrual, harms that extend well past the final paycheck.
• Suppressed income across a career affects retirement readiness. Workers who are systematically under-leveled contribute less to employer-matched retirement accounts because both their contribution base and the employer match are calibrated to a falsely lowered salary. This creates a retirement security gap that compounds over decades.

Economic Inequality

The structural mechanism described in this complaint, under-leveling at hire that anchors all future compensation, is a textbook engine of intergenerational wealth inequality. The harm is not one paycheck; it is a career-long trajectory deliberately pushed below its fair starting point.

• Over 7,500 employees are named in the class. If each worker was underpaid by even a conservative $3,000 per year and the average tenure in the covered roles was five years, the aggregate wage theft across the class would exceed $112 million. The $26 million settlement represents a fraction of that estimate.
• Mastercard’s own 2023 data shows Black and Hispanic workers collectively earning 5.7 cents less per dollar than white workers. At Mastercard’s reported U.S. workforce scale, this translates to a systematic annual transfer of wealth away from communities that already face documented wealth gaps relative to white households.
• Career Level directly controls equity award compensation, including restricted stock units. Under-leveled workers receive smaller equity grants tied to their suppressed level. In a company that generated $25 billion in revenue in 2023, those missed equity awards represent a compounding exclusion from the wealth generated by the company’s own growth.
• The complaint identifies that Mastercard’s deviations from its salary structure disproportionately benefited white and male employees while the structure itself was applied rigidly to suppress pay for Black, Hispanic, and female workers. This is the dual mechanism: the policy harms one group and the exceptions benefit another.
• The plaintiffs documented that pay inequity compounds over time because raises and promotions are percentages of the current level. A worker suppressed at Level 8 who earns a 4% raise earns a smaller dollar increase than a comparator at Level 7 earning the same percentage. The gap does not close; it widens every cycle.
• Gomes was a contractor for two years before conversion. Upon becoming a full employee, she received no bump in level or pay reflecting that tenure. This is a documented practice of using contractor status as a mechanism to delay or deny the compensation recognition that full employment would typically trigger, a pattern that falls hardest on workers who already face systemic barriers to entry-level parity.

The Math Mastercard Was Willing to Accept

What Now: Who to Pressure, What to Watch, How to Organize

The $26 million settlement resolves the lawsuit, but it does not resolve the system. Mastercard keeps its career-level architecture. No executive is named as individually liable in this complaint. The injunctive relief sought in the complaint, which would force Mastercard to change its leveling and compensation practices, is worth watching closely as settlement details emerge.

Leadership and Corporate Roles Named or Implicated

• Mastercard, Inc. is the named defendant. The complaint establishes that the company maintains “centralized control, oversight, and direction over the operation of its facilities, including its employment practices.” Responsibility sits at the corporate level.
• Individual executives are [REDACTED – Not in Source]. The complaint does not name C-suite officers as individual defendants. Accountability stops at the corporate entity unless regulators or future litigation go further.

Watchlist: Regulatory Bodies

• The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC): the federal agency with jurisdiction over Title VII and Equal Pay Act enforcement. Class members can file charges independently of this litigation.
• The U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division: enforces the Federal Equal Pay Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act, the parent statute under which the EPA sits.
• The New York State Division of Human Rights: enforces the New York State Human Rights Law cited in this complaint (N.Y. Exec. L. §§ 290 et seq.).
• The New York City Commission on Human Rights: enforces the New York City Human Rights Law, which the complaint describes as one of the most protective anti-discrimination laws in the country.
• The New York State Department of Labor: enforces the New York Equal Pay Law (N.Y. Lab. L. § 194) cited as a separate cause of action in this case.
• The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC): Mastercard is a publicly traded company. If internal pay-equity analyses were withheld from material disclosures, SEC human capital reporting rules may be relevant. Worth monitoring.

Mutual Aid, Local Organizing, and Grassroots Resistance

• If you are a current or former Mastercard employee in Career Levels 4 through 10, contact the law firm Outten & Golden LLP (212-245-1000), the counsel of record for the plaintiffs, to understand your eligibility to participate in the class or collective action before settlement deadlines close.
• Document your Career Level assignment, your offer letter level, the level of comparable colleagues, and any compensation adjustments you received with explanations. This paper trail is the foundation of any future claim or complaint filing.
• Connect with local chapters of the National Employment Law Project (NELP), which provides free resources on equal pay rights and how to file complaints with the EEOC or state equivalents, with no attorney required to start the process.
• Support pay transparency legislation in your state. The complaint explicitly notes that Mastercard does not include Career Levels in external job postings, a practice that pay transparency laws in states like New York and Colorado are designed to address. Advocate for full salary band disclosure, including Career Level, in all job postings.
• If you work at any company that uses a tiered career-level compensation structure, request your band and level in writing, ask HR to confirm the salary range for your level, and compare your placement to colleagues performing the same work. Knowing your level is the first defensive move.
• Share this story with finance workers, tech workers, and corporate employees in your network. The 7,500-person class in this lawsuit grew because workers compared notes. The system depends on workers not talking to each other about pay.