When Big Tech fights race-based discrimination, Apple openly bans it.

To combat caste-based discrimination, the Indian government reserves places in top Indian universities for underclassmen, who often take that opportunity and turn it into a tech career in Silicon Valley. In the US, discrimination laws do not specifically protect citizens based on race, although that is changing. According to Reuters, among the big tech companies that rely on Indian-trained workers, Apple is the most outspoken about preventing racial discrimination among its American workers.

First publicly reported this week, Apple updated its 2020 employee conduct policy to “clearly prohibit discrimination based on race,” which “prohibits discrimination based on race, gender, age, and national origin.”

The decision comes after a California employment watchdog defending a low-caste engineer at Cisco Systems filed “the first US employment lawsuit alleging casteism” in June 2020. The engineer alleged that two of his Cisco bosses had hindered his growth opportunities at the tech company because they were senior executives.

Although Cisco has denied wrongdoing and says it is protected because California law does not prohibit racial discrimination, the company will have to formally lift these defenses in court. The appellate panel denied Cisco’s request for private arbitration. Cisco did not immediately provide Ars with comment on the lawsuit or the company’s internal policies. (Update A Cisco spokesman declined to comment on ongoing litigation.)

Historically, the family was determined by family lineage, with the lowest class assigned the worst jobs and the highest performers earning the best wages. Over time, studies have shown that the caste system made higher workers less likely to cooperate with people belonging to lower castes. Although today lower Indians can compete for better jobs, some high-caste workers in tech companies may still see promoting members of lower castes as an insult to their caste.

Reuters interviewed “nearly two dozen” low-income US tech workers who said they had been overlooked for “hiring, promotion and social activities” based on “symptoms.” Those signs can be based on their name, where they were born, or what they eat for lunch.

U.S. labor laws include the definition of discrimination on a par with racism and sexism, leaving each tech company to develop its own solutions to alleged discrimination. Reuters reviewed US industries employing “hundreds of thousands of workers from India” and found “false results” on casteism.

Apple told Reuters that the company “updated the language two years ago” in its equal employment opportunity and anti-harassment policies to reinforce that the company prohibits “discrimination or harassment based on race.” Ars did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

IBM is another technology company that considers casteism in its global policies.

But a Reuters review of internal policy documents from companies such as Meta, Microsoft, Google and Amazon shows they do not explicitly prohibit casteism. All of these companies told Reuters they had “zero tolerance for hateful prejudice,” but some said “such discrimination falls within categories such as race and ethnicity.” Those assurances weren’t enough to stop more than 1,600 Google employees from signing a petition calling for the company to add civility to its global employee code of conduct as a form of prohibited discrimination.

Apple hasn’t said whether any complaints about casteism have been filed since it updated its policy, but it’s clear from Google’s complaint that at least some US workers believe many tech giants are following Apple’s lead. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Ars.

The outcome of the Cisco discrimination case, which is expected to come early next year, could lead to further changes for tech companies that have developed their policies based on both US discrimination laws and federal and state guidelines.