HCL Technologies Ltd., an information technology outsourcing firm based in India with U.S. headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, faces a lawsuit claiming that the company favors South Asians in its hiring and promotion practices.

The class action complaint filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California claims that at least 70 percent of HCL’s U.S.-based workforce is South Asian, primarily from India. That percentage, according to the lawsuit, greatly outpaces the number of people of South Asian ancestry in the U.S. population (1 to 2 percent) and the U.S. IT workforce (about 12 percent).