A female Tesla employee who still works at the electric automaker contends in a lawsuit that she was discriminated against for being a woman, and then penalised when she complained to company officials.

A.J. Vandermeyden, 33, filed the suit last northern autumn, but her case surfaced on Tuesday US time with the publication of an interview she gave to The Guardian.

"It's shocking in this day and age that this is still a fight we have to have," she told the British publication.

Vandermeyden claims that she was paid a lower salary, whistled at by male colleagues and found solutions to vehicle quality control issues but did not get promoted while male colleagues did.

Those complaints echo claims of discriminatory workplace conditions at Uber levelled by former employee Susan Fowler, whose blog post on the matter has triggered an investigation and a crisis at the ride hailing giant.

They also come at a time when Tesla is facing workplace issue claims from factory worker Jose Moran, who has blogged about gruelling working conditions at the company's Fremont, California, plant where $US100,000 ($130,000) Model X and S sedans are built.

CEO Elon Musk tweeted his belief that Moran was a paid agitator for the United Auto Workers union, which has been trying to unionise the factory, and called the charges "morally outrageous".

Vandermeyden's attorney, Therese Lawless of Lawless & Lawless, told USA TODAY that her client's interview was conducted weeks ago and was not timed to appear shortly after Uber's sexual discrimination woes made news.

'She loves the product'

"It's completely coincidental," said Lawless, who represented Ellen Pao in her unsuccessful 2015 discrimination suit again Silicon Valley investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufied & Byers.

"But interestingly, she's getting a lot of support today," Lawless said. "She's moved into a different department (than the general assembly department). She loves the product. She tried to get it changed internally but couldn't. So she decided to do it from the outside."

Lawless said Vandermeyden, who joined Uber in 2013, is seeking a higher pay grade commensurate with her skills, back pay and damages for emotional distress. Lawless says Tesla is now trying to move the case to binding arbitration based on signed employee forms that Lawless claims violate employee rights.

"We're challenging Tesla's employee confidentiality agreement, which is very broad and says that employees can't talk about anything they experience or see at Tesla," she says. "It's absurd. That's fine regarding trade secrets, but it's illegal to prohibit people from talking about working conditions for their pay."

Tesla shares third-party review

In a statement provided to USA TODAY, Tesla said that Vandermeyden rose quickly in the company despite not having an engineering degree, from the paint shop to general assembly.

"Even after she made her complaints of alleged discrimination, she sought and was advanced into at least one other new role," the statement said, adding that when Vandermeyden raised her concerns about the workplace the company hired a "neutral third party" to investigate the claims.

"After an exhaustive review of the facts, the independent investigator determined that Ms Vandermeyden's 'claims of gender discrimination, harassment, and retaliation have not been substantiated' [and] without this context, the story presented in the [Guardian] article is misleading," the statement concluded.

Tesla provided USA TODAY with a redacted version of the findings from what it describes as its neutral third party, Anne Hilbert of EMC2Law, for the purpose of summarising its findings.

According to Hilbert, Vandermeyden was in the middle of her peer group's pay scale, promotions of male peers were not due to gender discrimination, and the catcalls from assembly line colleagues were more insensitive than sexist.

While the outcome of Vandermeyden's workplace suit won't be known for some time, it highlights what is far from a new issue in Silicon Valley.

Tech firms are known for a hard-charging culture; Musk himself has bragged about laying out a sleeping bag at the end of the Tesla assembly line. But the flip side includes extreme pressure to perform that often backfires on women.

The Elephant in the Valley, a survey of women in tech, finds that a majority of women feel they are criticised for being too aggressive. That same survey found that more than half of respondents have experienced unwanted sexual advances at work.