Silicon Valley bro sues Yahoo for reverse discrimination
But the company's diversity reports don't jive with the allegations.
This week hasn't been particularly kind to beleaguered internet company Yahoo. CEO Marissa Mayer, former chief marketing officer Kathy Savitt and editor-in-chief of Yahoo News Megan Liberman have been accused of engaging in gender discrimination. According to The Mercury News, a lawsuit has been filed by former editorial director Scott Ard on the grounds that "Mayer encouraged and fostered the use of (an employee performance-rating system) to accommodate management's subjective biases and personal opinions, to the detriment of Yahoo's male employees."
Ard's suit also claims that within a year and a half, CMO Savitt had increased the number of "top female managers" from 20 percent to 80 percent.
"Savitt has publicly expressed support for increasing the number of women in media and has intentionally hired and promoted women because of their gender, while terminating, demoting or laying off male employees because of their gender," the suit states.
"Of the approximately 16 senior-level editorial employees hired or promoted by Savitt in approximately an 18-month period, 14 of them, or 87 percent, were female."
Ard, former Yahoo editorial director and current editor-in-chief of the Silicon Valley Business Journal, says that the performance review system was put in place to side-step California's Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) act. WARN requires early warning of mass layoffs. He says that in 2014, his job was given to a recent female hire. Ard claims during his subsequent January 2015 review call he was told that because he wasn't performing up to standards, he was being fired.
That's after being rewarded with positive performance reviews and stock options for "fully satisfactory" work prior.
For its part, Yahoo says that the performance review process wasn't guided by misandry, but fairness.
"Our performance-review process was developed to allow employees at all levels of the company to receive meaningful, regular and actionable feedback from others," according to spokesperson Carolyn Clark in a statement to the Mercury News. "We believe this process allows our team to develop and do their best work. Our performance-review process also allows for high performers to engage in increasingly larger opportunities at our company, as well as for low performers to be transitioned out."
Yahoo diversity reports indicate that women in leadership positions grew a whopping one percent from 2014 to 2015 (PDF). Those numbers don't exactly support Ard's claims, and this seems more like a pushback against diversity initiatives at tech companies than it is rooted in facts. Now, investigations surrounding how the company covered up a massive data breach and claims of it aiding the US government's surveillance efforts are another matter entirely.
