Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer caught purging male employees within the company

Synobun

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Source: "Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male employees, lawsuit charges"

A prominent local media executive fired from Yahoo last year has filed a lawsuit accusing CEO Marissa Mayer of leading a campaign to purge male employees.

“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,” said the suit by Scott Ard filed this week in federal district court in San Jose.

Ard, who worked for Yahoo for 3 ½ years until January 2015, is now editor-in-chief of the Silicon Valley Business Journal. His lawsuit also claims that Yahoo illegally fired large numbers of workers ousted under a performance-rating system imposed by Mayer. That allegation was not tied to gender.

[...]

“When Savitt began at Yahoo the top managers reporting to her … including the chief editors of the verticals and magazines, were less than 20 percent female. Within a year and a half those top managers were more than 80 percent female,” the lawsuit said. “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.

“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,” the lawsuit said.


[...]

Yahoo’s use of this review system to fire many workers individually in a short time period broke the U.S. and California Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) acts, which mandate advance notification of mass layoffs, the suit alleged. “Marissa Mayer became CEO on a wave of optimism and then engaged in a sleight of hand to terminate large numbers of employees without announcing a single layoff,” the suit said.

Do you believe Marissa Mayer is intentionally firing employees due to their gender, or do you think this lawsuit is merely a case of a disgruntled employee?

Do you think people who are publicly vocal about increasing certain demographics in employment should be kept a closer eye on by oversight committees who ensure fair employment practices?
 
I want to make a really bad joke here, but this is a shiny new forum, so I'll refrain and say this was probably an accidental result of pushing to fulfill the diversity quota/expectation or some other such nonsense.
 
Well, one thing's for sure: The discussions in those articles will certainly involve people arguing that "Women do the thing they accuse men of doing, the irony!" and people arguing that "Men do it all the time, but once a woman does it, she's sued immediately - oh, the oppression!".

Evidence in numbers seems to be stacked against her though. However, from what we know I doubt intent can be proven.
 
The article implies that, perhaps, Yahoo's female employees are simply better at not pissing people off. Most business like this work on an intricate system of petty-politic and nepotism, so throwing the whole thing open to this weird, sorta-kinda-democratic system of peer review is going to produce some weird results.

Unless we have more details on this review system, I think it's quite hard to comment.
 
I'm really interested if their salaries remained the same. Could be cheaper to run more women because they ask for smaller raises and less frequently, something I'm sure they are aware of at any decent HR.
 
I had the impression Yahoo was generally just waiting to be cut up into pieces and sold of to the highest bidder of the last couple of years. That might affect your personnel management more generally.
 
The whole thing with "calibrating" performances seems pretty incriminating, and credible. No doubt this was portrayed as a way to "equalize" women's performances. If I had that happen to me, you had better believe I'd sue.
 
I had the impression Yahoo was generally just waiting to be cut up into pieces and sold of to the highest bidder of the last couple of years. That might affect your personnel management more generally.
Are you implying there's a glass cliff situation at play?
 
Are you implying there's a glass cliff situation at play?
Well, more that the situation described, with major management turn-over, borderline legal lay-offs and disgruntled employees suing the company makes a lot of sense in the context of a company tearing up its operations so that only the valuable assets remain and can be sold.
 
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