Tesla Fires Female Engineer Who Alleged Sexual Harassment (theguardian.com)

Tesla has fired a female engineer who accused the company of ignoring her complaints of sexual harassment and paying her less than her male counterparts. AJ Vandermeyden, who went public with her discrimination lawsuit against Tesla in February, was dismissed from the company this week. The Guardian reports: Vandermeyden had claimed she was taunted and catcalled by male employees and that Tesla failed to address her complaints about the harassment, unequal pay and discrimination. "It's shocking in this day and age that this is still a fight we have to have," she said at the time. In a statement to the Guardian, Tesla confirmed the company had fired Vandermeyden, saying it had thoroughly investigated the employee's allegations with the help of "a neutral, third-party expert" and concluded her complaints were unmerited. "Despite repeatedly receiving special treatment at the expense of others, Ms Vandermeyden nonetheless chose to pursue a miscarriage of justice by suing Tesla and falsely attacking our company in the press," a Tesla spokesperson said. "After we carefully considered the facts on multiple occasions and were absolutely convinced that Ms Vandermeyden's claims were illegitimate, we had no choice but to end her employment at Tesla."

Comments

Re:Fuck yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

I think she's lying about the whole thing. Generally when people try suing over discrimination, it's a false accusation and it's extremely difficult to prove.

I also don't believe that she was being harassed or catcalled after seeing a picture of her.

Ballsy

[alvinrod]

Tessa must have some pretty damning evidence against her to fire her for this, because it does open up a legal case against them for retaliation, which their HR department and legal team are no doubt well aware. They'd have to have solid proof that she made it all up or so flagrantly lied about parts of it to be able to fire her over it without legal repercussion.

Re:Ballsy

[gweihir]

Indeed. Whenever some people are really discriminated against, you find others that are just trying to get a free ride on this. Pretty bad. The worst case is women claiming to have been raped, when nothing like that happened. It is just far too easy to do and apparently many cannot resist.

Re:Ballsy

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. Whenever some people are really discriminated against, you find other conservatives that are just trying to blame the victim for the perp's shitty behavior. It is just far too easy to do and apparently many like you cannot resist.

Re:Ballsy

[luis_a_espinal]

It doesn't say why she was fired, but most companies won't say that.

TFA does have a statement by Tesla about the reason for firing her:

“The termination was based on Ms Vandermeyden behaving in what the evidence indicates is a fundamentally false and misleading manner, not as a result of retaliation for the lawsuit,” the spokesperson added. “It is impossible to trust anyone after they have behaved in such a manner and therefore continued employment is also impossible.”

Yeah. Launching a lawsuit like that just to be found w/o merits by a third, neutral party, that's reason enough to fire her. Or him, or whatever. The minimal trust required to keep someone on payroll has been broken.

Bad career move from her part (and if she did it with premeditated malice and dishonesty, she just fucked a whole bunch of women who might be real victims of discrimination.)

Re:Ballsy

[Ol Olsoc]

Tesla is playing an extremely dangerous game by firing the woman. Unless they have some hard proof that she made the entire thing up, her lawyer will file a retaliation suit in addition to the discrimination suit and it won't be a question of IF Tesla pays out, but HOW MUCH.

So what you are saying is that a disruptive employee must be kept on staff based on gender?

We've been seeing cases of disruptive females losing their discrimination cases, Ellen Pao is perhaps the most prominent example.

Being a disruptive employee is not a gender specific thing, I've worked with both. The problem employee does tend to grasp at anything to continue to be disruptive, regardless of gender. Certain groups have extra claims they can make. And when you can play the gender card, you will immediately polarize the issue, with people falling into predictable positions.

We don't know the particulars of this case, so it is difficult to determine who did what. But having a third party investigate the issue was smart on Tesla's part.

Now that being said, and with the firing, I suspect that Tesla has at the least, a solid case. I would not be surprised if they refused to settle and took any resulting lawsuit to open court.

Let's take gender out of the equation, and move to a similar matter. Where I spent most of my career, there were a number of service workers. There were a small but not insignificant number of these workers that were Workman's comp/SS disability cases waiting to happen. Minor injuries - like the kind that required a band-aid and antiseptic, were trumped up by these folk as a injury so severe that they could not ever work again. I recall one person who tried to get disability for a back muscle spasm.

And yup, they were so adamant about the evil place making them work. And yup, almost all were exposed if they did manage to get disability. They keep track of work these days, and if a person is really interesting, they'll have someone tail them and take video and photos. But the point is that there are people out there who are willing to use every tool at their disposal, and the person's sex is now often used as a bludgeon.

Regardless, it will be interesting to see how this one plays out. But if the Pao case is any indication, a person playing the gender discrimination card case is not a slam dunk when a third party is investigating the issue.

Re:Ballsy

[cyberchondriac]

Indeed? Conservatives generally place blame for crime where it lies; on the criminals. They go too easy on white collar crime, but generally acknowledge victims and perpetrators for what they are and the roles they play.
Conversely, liberalism frequently defends violent criminals and twists things to instead portray them as victims, by way of absolving people of personal responsibility (what a concept), and laying blame at the feet of "society", or "Big Pharma", the NRA, "white privilege" (more recently), corporations, and the ever popular "industrial prison complex". They rally for BLM riots, justify the burning of cars, beating of objectors, and destruction of businesses; protest on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal, berate and stereotype law enforcement, venerate Che Guevara and Castro, and discount the growing threat of ISIS and Al Queada.
However, if the criminal can be identified (whether correctly or incorrectly) as "right wing", then all bets are off; suddenly personal responsibility is a factor again; there's blood in the water and new heights of Godwinism are achieved, though the aforementioned items might share some blame as well (usually the NRA).
Overall, in liberalism, the murderer/attacker/thief/burglar/rapist/mugger is rarely to blame for their violent, anti-social behavior. It's everything else that drove them to this. This is why since an early age I could never vote liberal, it's the pretzel logic, the disregard for actual, hurting victims and the bizarre coddling of violent sociopaths, the twisted definition of compassion and skewing of priorities, despite the fact that I agree with them on some of the other issues.

There's no good outcome here.

[Gravis Zero]

Regardless of the claims legitimacy, she was becoming increasingly hostile toward the company and thus a liability. That said, I really hope there was no discrimination here.

Entitled

[geekymachoman]

> "Despite repeatedly receiving special treatment at the expense of others, Ms Vandermeyden nonetheless chose to pursue a miscarriage of justice by suing Tesla and falsely attacking our company in the press," ...

Some of them expect special treatment even, and then bitch about it, or in this case, try to milk some money out of the company.. because .. women harassment, and "wage gap" is hip nowdays.

Plain bullshit, is what it is.

Re:Entitled

[TWX]

I've seen both in tech circles. I've seen women that were harassed, and I've seen women that got special treatment where they were good at deflecting the work that was supposed to be assigned to them to others, or faced no punitive action for severely underperforming to the point that it became obvious to outsiders.

I've also seen men that were bullied in the workplace and did not have any advancement, and men that also managed to underperform for extended periods of time. Gender doesn't really dictate this.

Frankly we're not going to ever know the particulars of this case. Basically none of us were there, and it would behoove anyone that was to not say anything unless it's part of any legal proceedings and behind closed doors, or potentially in-court. At the moment there's only a single datapoint, so there isn't enough information for us to make any real conclusions. She may well be right, and could have been the target of specific harassment that was covered-up by some element of management, or she could be making false claims. There just isn't enough information for us to conclude anything.

Re:Entitled

[deek]

That's very true, but from the actions taken, we can conclude that Tesla are very confident that they're on solid ground here. Hence the chances of her being the type to game the system are pretty high. Not conclusive, certainly, but still quite high.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Hiring quotas result in employees that take their jobs for granted, don't produce, and cause trouble....and they get away with it because the company can't fire them due to the quota.

It IS true that some places tolerate harassment and pay women unfairly. It is ALSO true that some women make these accusations when they aren't true, to get EVEN MORE pay and EVEN MORE special treatment. Abuses exist on both sides, and so we should not try to fix them with a one-sided solution.

This is why

[slashmydots]

This is why you don't hire SJW feminist snowflakes.

Trust deterioration.

[DrYak]

Whenever some people are really discriminated against, you find others that are just trying to get a free ride on this. Pretty bad.

The free rider are pretty bad indeed. Even more so, because they contribute to reduce the trust in actual victims.

The couple of stupid women claiming "rape" just to get some money, will make it all more difficult for all the *actual real* rape victims out-there to speak, because the victims will fear they won't be believed.

It's a sort of Girl who cried wolf, except that the consequences of "excessive wolf-crying" will fall on someone else.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

You get paid what you negotiate for when you get hired. Want more? Ask for more at the start.

If you are an engineer that agreed to $90k a year and I'm an engineer that held out for $125k a year (numbers are for illustration, I have no idea what she makes), and the company decided they needed us both, that isn't discrimination.

If you accepted $90k a year and were asked to take over the job I was doing, same job as you by your own admission, why should the company raise your salary?
You're doing the same work that you agreed to do when you were hired and accepted $90k.

Most companies have an across the board merit increase pool each year, 3-5% seems most common, so you and the guy next to you likely both go up the same percentage unless you either get promoted or do an above and beyond job.

Now if you requested $125k and I requested $125k and they said yes to me and no to you, but our backgrounds were equivalent, then maybe you have a case