According to the NYT, the spreadsheet was started in 2015 by a former employee who wanted to assist co-workers in negotiating better salaries.

The tech giant is now claiming the report is an unfair representation of the company’s salary structure.

"The analysis in this story is extremely flawed, as it features an extremely small sample size, and doesn’t include location, role, tenure or performance,” Gina Scigliano from Google said in a statement to Stylist.co.uk.

“This means that the story is comparing the compensation of, for example, a high-performing Level 5 engineer in the Bay Area with a low-performing Level 5 non-technical employee working in a different location. It doesn't make sense to compare the compensation of these two people. We do rigorous compensation analyses and when you compare like-for-like, women are paid 99.7% of what men are paid at Google."

But this isn’t the first time the company has faced allegations of sexism. Back in April this year the US Department of Labour accused the company of underpaying women. Google came back claiming they couldn’t provide more data because it would cost $100,000 (£76,000) and 500 hours of labour.

And only last month a Google employee who wrote a vitriolic internal memo criticising the company’s diversity policies was fired.

The incendiary note, written by former Google engineer James Damore, went viral. Over 10 pages, Damore accused the tech company of ignoring the views and values of its conservative employees, and suggested that the lack of women in technology and leadership positions could be attributed to biological differences.

He also argued that Google was engaging in “discriminatory practices” by trying to “achieve a more equal gender and race representation”, and called for less empathy in the workplace.

In an email, he said that he had been fired for “perpetuating gender stereotypes”.

Images: Getty

Google comes under fire for 'paying women less than men' - again