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Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Led Illegal Purge of Male Employees, Lawsuit Charges (mercurynews.com)

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. From a MercuryNews article: Ard, who worked for Yahoo for 3 and a half 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. Yahoo spokeswoman Carolyn Clark said Yahoo couldn't comment on pending litigation, but she defended the company's performance-review process, which she said was guided by "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," Clark said. "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."

13 of 566 comments (clear)

  1. Cue the feminists by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Cue the feminists to start pointing out that it's impossible to be sexist against white males because we all site at the top of the power hierarchy. Cue the feminists to also call this guy a whiner and tell him to suck it up.

    1. Re:Cue the feminists by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Feminism falls within that as Al Qaeda falls within Islam and Westboro Baptist Church falls within Christianity.

      On this note, there is no such thing as a bad or a good feminist. There are just feminists who are too lazy or unwilling to self-regulate their collective, and other feminists.
      To automatically vocally denounce a feminist for acting radically or unbecoming of the ideal, is to only pull No True Scotsman arguments for the purpose of shedding the responsibility to self-regulate your movement.
      The idea that feminism is infallible is precisely what makes it such a hated and crappy movement, and it's also what produces egoistic and narcissistic tendency within the movement. And to state that feminist definition has been "twisted" just so the precious label can remain infallible and pure, is precisely the kind of mentality which only further blemishes feminism.
      The crux of the matter is, anyone who labels themselves a feminist is not fighting for equal rights, because people who fight for equal rights aren't in need of worthless labels or worthless label defending.
      They are out there in the field doing shit, rather than playing Internet warrior from a chair scouring through Twitter for their next male (and even female as of late) target to "shame" and defame because they have different opinions.

      Internet feminists are just plain garbage.

    2. Re:Cue the feminists by elrous0 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Or are you suggesting that the 1960s broke up all-american hard-working black nuclear families?

      Sadly, pretty much yeah. The Great Society social programs of the 1960's (that perversely rewarded single parent households), combined with the get-tough-on-crime/War on Drugs policies of the 1980's (that began incarcerating black men at an unprecedented rate) pretty much destroyed the traditional black family.

      Today, two-thirds of black kids live in single-parent households and 72% of them are born out of wedlock. Conversely, only 1 in 4 white kids live in single-parent households and only 25% of them are born out of wedlock.

      --
      SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
  2. Proof her perf evaluations weren't fair by JoeyRox · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Because if they were fair they would have lead to her own termination.

    1. Re:Proof her perf evaluations weren't fair by ourlovecanlastforeve · · Score: 5, Interesting

      As a guy who worked in customer service for 15 years and one who spent several years doing it at Yahoo I can tell you that those employee evaluations are nothing more than permission slips to fire employees when they are no longer needed instead of laying them off.

      They are intentionally designed with metrics that are impossible to meet and the targets are open to interpenetration by managers, which creates an ever moving target that can't be hit.

      It is just like in Office Space where the boss asks the waitress "what do you think of a person who just does the bare minimum."

      Meeting expectations is never enough. No matter how good you are, when it comes time to reduce staff you will be eliminated and you have no recourse because the numbers they made up say you performed poorly.

      But it's not just Yahoo who does this -- rather it's been the practice at every company I've ever worked at.

  3. Sounds like the UK civil service by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In the UK civil service they introduced a performance management system with bands:

    Must improve
    Achieved
    Exceeded

    A certain percentage of employees must be in each band.

    Most civil service middle managers are women. And what do you know... the percentage of men put into "must improve" is almost double that of women. 'Cos it's much easier for women to fuck over men than their gal pals. That's on top of the blatant discrimination against men that goes on in customer facing roles - where all the real opportunities and back office jobs are reserved for gal pals of female managers.

    It's a disgrace. It's right there in the stats. Male employees have publicly asked "what's being done to address this" and get fobbed off every time. The Civil Service doesn't BADLY want to answer that question - even though, by the definitions they set up, it is rock solid evidence of discrimination.

    It just goes to show. Women show an in-group preference for other women and try to push out men. Men get little or no development unless they grab whatever chances they can and move onto other jobs... fast.

  4. Income is down, so... by MMC+Monster · · Score: 5, Funny

    She was probably just trying to curtail cost by firing the male employees.

    Wasn't this reported in The Onion?

    --
    Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
  5. Marissa, Holmes, and Pao should combine by JoeyRox · · Score: 5, Funny

    And start a new company that combines their core strengths of incompetency, fraud, and perpetual social injustice. They can name the company "Loss Carry Forward, Inc."

  6. A question for westerners by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I need you westerners to explain something about this feminism fart of yours.

    Why is it, and everything along with it, lead by white women?
    White women are unarguably the most privileged class on this planet.
    - Most prefer white women for dating as dating app surveys showcase.
    - Most judicial systems are biased towards white women like no other race or gender on this planet.
    - They are much more likely to get away with anything and everything than any other class.
    - They have the biggest proportion of material wealth given to them for free/without work/without expended effort on this planet unlike any other class. Through history, most luxury resources, animal hides, bling, leathers, every-fucking-thing exploited from colonization, ended up in the rooms and on the bodies of white women.
    - Is there a discussion being had among a diverse group of people? White women always get the lead.
    - For some reason, white women are the "representative leadership" for minority groups that have nothing to do with them. Case in point the LGBT for some reason, albeit the LGBT is questioning their involvement.
    - White women were never prosecuted for their gender alone, or their skin alone. They were never forced to wear veils, they were never forced to mutilate their clits, they were never hanged and burned for being women like homosexuals and blacks were for their sexuality and skin color respectively. The closest thing they ever got was witch burning, though that has nothing to do with gender but more individual questionable practices.

    What the fuck is the point of this social justice shit if justice is being defined by the most unjust privileged class in the world - white women?

  7. Typo in the summary? by UnknowingFool · · Score: 5, Informative

    The title says it was a "male purge" but also says "That allegation was not tied to gender." Reading the article it says women were less than 20% of the chief editors and within 18 months it was 80%. The main plaintiff does not actually single out Mayer but another editor Megan Liberman. Also the summary fails to mention that this lawsuit was about Yahoo News not Yahoo overall.

    --
    Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
  8. Re:The opressed can not opress by Urist+McSlashdot · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The problem is that when I look in a dictionary, it says that racism is prejudice or discrimination based on race, and that sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on sex or gender. And that's how lots of people use those words. The Bustle article you linked to even says, "Sure, men might experience discrimination, bullying or even disparagement of their gender," which is literally sexism.

    But you, and others like you, have added "institutional or systemic" to the definitions. And then you tell other people that they're wrong if they use those words without that implicit addition.

    What I call racism you call prejudice based on race (which is the dictionary definition of racism). And what you call racism I call systemic racism. I've met plenty of people who will readily acknowledge that systemic racism and sexism exist and are important problems. They'll also readily acknowledge that white men in America cannot be victims of systemic sexism and racism (although the patriarchal system is detrimental to men in various ways, but that's another discussion). They just use slightly different language than you do.

    Trying to impose a new definition on words that are thoroughly entrenched in our language makes you come across as an asshat and makes people stop listening. Maybe this whole conversation would go better if you didn't tell an enormous swath of the country that their consensus definitions are wrong and just resigned yourself to putting the word "systemic" in front.

  9. Re:The opressed can not opress by Solandri · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That is self-contradictory. If discrimination against an individual male can be justified because of the average traits of males as a whole can legitimately warrant that discrimination, then discrimination against any individual can be justified because of the average traits of the larger group he/she belongs to.

    The whole point of anti-stereotype and anti-discrimination statutes is to prohibit using average traits of the group an individual belongs to as justification for sanctions against that individual. The assumption being that while the stereotype may be true of the group on average, it may not be true of a particular individual who belongs to that group, and it is wrong to pre-assume that individual exhibits those traits and thus must be sanctioned for it.

    In other words, you cannot pick and choose which groups get protection from discrimination and stereotyping. Either all are protected, or none are. Either applying the average traits of a group to all individual members of that group is OK, or it is wrong.

  10. LOL by Trailer+Trash · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Our performance-review process was developed to allow employees at all levels of the company to receive meaningful, regular and actionable feedback from others," Clark said. "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."

    Mayer still has a job, therefore something here isn't true.