A leading medical device company is being sued by a former engineer who alleges she was wrongfully terminated in 2024 for reporting her concerns about the gender discrimination and the authenticity of management’s reporting of data regression.
Jia Sheng’s Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit alleges wrongful discharge, retaliation, discrimination, harassment, failure to prevent harassment, and both intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress. She seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages in the suit filed Dec. 23.
Medtronic is one of the biggest medical tech companies in the world and is currently the largest medical device company in the world by revenue. The company also oversees diabetes therapy management and has a location in Northridge.
A Medtronic spokeswoman issued the following comment regarding Sheng’s case:
“We have recently become aware of a lawsuit filed by a former employee,” the statement read. “Medtronic takes all such matters seriously and is committed to addressing them. We remain dedicated to maintaining a respectful, inclusive and fair workplace for all employees.”
Sheng was hired in October 2023 as a senior software engineering manager and she reported to the director of software engineering. She was initially assigned to work on the EOFlow Co. Ltd. account, an insulin patch manufacturing company that Medtronic considered acquiring, but later dropped the effort.
Sheng was subsequently assigned to supervise a team of mostly women engineers whose duties included running routine software functional regression and system integration tests. In November 2023, one of Sheng’s supervisors began presenting daily regression results that the plaintiff knew were inauthentic because her team was running the data from that day and had not yet started their analysis, according to the suit.
But managers laughed at Sheng when she expressed her concerns during a meeting, according to the suit, which further states she spoke with a representative from a Ukraine consulting company, which confirmed the data was counterfeit and done to make the Medtronic vice president happy.
“Plaintiff had serious concerns,” the suit states. “The fake, inaccurate data goes against basic software data policy and practice and her team was tasked with data collection and presentation.”
Regression is a statistical technique that relates a dependent variable to one or more independent variables.
Sheng continued talking about the issue and in January 2024, a Medtronic manager began bullying a female Sheng team member, leaving her in tears, according to the suit, which further states that Sheng told another manager the bullying involved gender-based discrimination.
But the other manager concluded that Sheng was naive and the actions of the manager accused of bullying were “done with good intention,” the suit states. The other manager also “dissuaded” Sheng from reporting the alleged bullying to human resources, suggesting she focus on work and “foreshadowing the retaliation that was to come,” the suit states.
Sheng was initially encouraged by a change in the management overseeing her team, but her team was instead removed from data regression tasks and given a new assignment and the plaintiff was denied a chance to be part of the interviewing process for a new senior test engineer who the plaintiff would oversee, the suit states.
Sheng was terminated last May and told it was due to a reduction in employees due to “the aborted acquisition of EOFlow,” but the plaintiff maintains the reason given was an excuse and that she lost her job in retaliation for her alleged fake data complaints.
That same month, the Sheng team member who was the subject of the alleged bullying by the manager was given a the lowest possible job performance score and the team member’s alleged harasser told the plaintiff he needed to give the woman a score “low enough so she could be fired,” the suit states.