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Three Women Suing Microsoft for Bias Want To Add 8,630 Peers (bloomberg.com)
A reader shares a report: A lawsuit accusing Microsoft of discriminating against women in technical and engineering roles is poised to grow a lot bigger if it wins class-action status. With the technology sector awash in challenges to white male dominance, the three women spearheading the case against Microsoft told a Seattle federal judge they want to represent about 8,630 peers who have worked for the company since 2012. The women said their expert consultants have determined that discrimination at the Redmond, Washington-based company cost female employees more than 500 promotions and $100 million to $238 million in pay, according to Oct. 27 court filings. They also accused the software maker of maintaining "an abusive, toxic 'boy's club' atmosphere, where women are ignored, abused, or degraded." Microsoft said it strongly disagrees with the allegations, saying the filings "mischaracterize data and other information."
I think we need to find out the lawyers representing all these cases. it seems every other week there is a new lawsuit over this and I wonder if its simply the same group of lawyers trying to make a buck.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Keep it up. Let's go all the way down the identity rabbit hole.
they have an amazing number of peer reviews.
. . . .was working for Microsoft. . . .(rimshot)
As a male who worked at a sausage party fortune 3 company in their "cyber defence" dept with only white males; tbh i see what they are saying. Multiple times I thought "are they really doing this? Yes they are". Racist jokes are the "black friend", making "curry" jokes around Indians, talking about which chick in xyz dept to "bang" or "her hair is JBF".... Needless to say I left that company. If a woman did bring a class action on the co I'd definitely be on their side....
They will distort reality to entitle themselves to whatever the fuck they want, paint you misogynist, and then sue you in a case with worldwide visibility.
If you had never hired them in the first place, then you wouldn't owe them anything and you wouldn't have to deal with this shit.
Seriously... you want to be treated like an equal? Take your lumps like the rest of us and stop making a big fucking stink out of the fact that you are a woman.
Class actions such as this are bullshit. Some attorney does not have the right to speak for me and make claims of wrongdoing on my behalf. Because one person suffered a tort does not mean everyone else did as well.
All of the lawyers bringing the suit are female right?
How can you prove a company systematically discriminated against a certain group of people? Are a few testimonies enough? Wouldn't those only prove that specific people was discriminated against?
I don't like discrimination but also don't like people who play victim
For the bias of giving birth, becoming unattractive after 35, and not being as smart as men.
Sometimes I shit in buckets and then put my feet in the bucket too.
If you lay down with snakes, you are going to get bit. MS, Google, etc.. Asked for this with their PC/SJW push. It proves that even when you give tons of money to girls who code programs and dedicate entire front pages of your website to the celebration of women, you still arnt politically correct for this generation of entitlement.
if you look at total women hired in tech vs total men, it's a boys club. if you look at computer science graduates there will be significantly more men.
it then follows that your hiring will see a similar statistical spread to the genders of computer science grads. if you have more than the statistical distribution of one or the other you've hired on the basis of gender. 18% of compsci majors are female. 25% of the tech sector is female. this means (statistically) that either women are more hire-able than men, or companies are taking a wider range of abilities from the available female resources to seem more egalitarian.
How about we do-the-needful and also have a lawsuit for discrimination against white American males..no one wants us anymore.. any company I walk into I just see oceans of male H1B's from India..no American males, no American females..
I think that for a company as large as Microsoft, it should be easy to get a credible sample size of witnesses to describe their experience working there, and records of hiring practices, to either confirm or discredit this claim.
.. I thought it said 8630 beers.
From what I've heard, they have a toxic culture that makes life miserable for most of them, not just women.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
"an abusive, toxic 'boy's club' atmosphere, where women are ignored, abused, or degraded." Microsoft said it strongly disagrees with the allegations, saying "we ignore, abuse and degrade underlings regardless of gender."
FTFY. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
... would be hard to find.
They do it to everybody, without regard to gender.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
This is the way it should happen... you have six different cases involving a dozen women or less with very specific evidence and testimony. You win all those cases and establish a pattern. Then you file for class action.
I'm sure someone somewhere at Microsoft discriminated against women,
But categorically? Of that I have a lot more doubt.
With lawsuits like these against many major companies, at some point won't companies start to think "the only way I can be sure not to discriminate against women is simply to not hire them", creating even more of a problem than it was trying to fix...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
With the technology sector awash in challenges to white male dominance...
You only need to use the one challenge that would actually work and it's gone. Minority competence.
Only the economically-incompetent could conclude otherwise:
http://tomwoods.com/the-equal-pay-day-scam-april-08-2014/
Really, who comes up with this drivel?
Has anyone noticed that the CEO is not a white male? How about the top HR person? Most of management? Microsoft is FAR from being a place where white male dominance is a thing. In fact, on the team I was on for several years, it was commonly observed that the best way to not get a promotion was to be white. It didn't really matter if you were a white male or white female, you were probably getting a mediocre to poor review no matter what you had done, so that someone the same race as the director could get the promotion. If you were a female from the same part of the world and were sufficiently subservient, you might also get a promotion, but us uppity white folk were last in line (in addition to being last to leave the building every night).
There are a lot of problems with the culture of Microsoft, and racism *is* one of them, but it's certainly not white-dominant racism. The biggest difference is, as a white male, I don't have a voice if I try to claim discrimination. My recourse is pretty much limited to either "shut up and deal with it" or "find a better company to work for." So, after years of the first option, I finally took the second option. That's white male privilege at work right there... "you're a white male, so you have the privilege to shut up and take it or get the hell out."
I think that there only need be available transparent, effective, remedial processes in place. It seems to me that nobody (with anything to lose) signs up for litigation as their FIRST course of action. It's expensive, it's stressful, it's embarrassing, and it can make it difficult to find employment opportunities in the future. I would guess that the Microsoft process for dealing with gender based harassment was lacking. There should be clearly delineated rules with transparent/vigorous investigation of infractions. Everything should be documented including any remedial steps taken.
In general, given how corporate friendly many courtrooms are, I think if a company showed sufficient evidence of its good faith efforts to create a safe/comfortable environment for all workers that most courts would give them the benefit of the doubt anyway.
I also think that the transparent and thorough investigation of issues when they arise is the only way to respect and protect both the rights of the accused and their accuser. I think it's most scary that we live in a time where accusations and the attention they attract serve as substitutes for investigation and due process. A lot of women and minorities have legitimate grievances and should be taken seriously. However "taken seriously" should involve the execution of a fair process with the goal of improving the work environment for everyone with an ultimate eye toward increasing productivity.
Besides, if "repeat offenders" had been intercepted earlier, they might not have become repeat offenders, and therefore may have been salvageable at an earlier stage vs emboldened to reach a later stage requiring far more drastic, potentially expensive and embarrassing remedies. It's usually far easier to recover from the complaint of one victim than to recover from the pile on complaints of 20-50 victims. It's far easier to claim misunderstanding in one instance than it is to try claim it in 20.
This whole situation sucks... for everyone involved. Mostly for the victims, but to the extent that talented individuals who with the proper interventions might have learned better and reformed before becoming significantly greater liabilities, they and the companies that employ their talents also suffer because while some offenders may have needed to be fired or worse, others could have been corrected and salvaged. A well engineered process could have differentiated between the two.
A man (of any race) who comments on a woman's appearance, to the extent that she is uncomfortable, may only need to be corrected not fired. Whereas a man who demands sexual favor as a prerequisite for advancement needs to be fired not corrected. The process makes the difference and the failure of the process leads to worse outcomes for all involved.
It's not unfair, since women are not competent when placed in competition with man. It's a fact, I never met a competent women as a programmer. Show me one!
Hey Billy Gates. Microsoft, IT sector, Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood, financal sector and government, time to go #MGTOW
$238 million for 8630 employees over 5 years comes out to about $5,500/year/employee.
That's a lot less than I would have expected for an upper limit at this early of a stage in the proceedings, when numbers are typically very optimistic in order to leave headroom for surprises as the case evolves.
I'd imagine that means their reasonable expectation of what they'll be able to show is quite a bit less than that, and maybe quite a bit less than even the $100 million (about $2,300/year/employee).
Really, who comes up with this drivel?
Has anyone noticed that the CEO is not a white male? How about the top HR person? Most of management? Microsoft is FAR from being a place where white male dominance is a thing. In fact, on the team I was on for several years, it was commonly observed that the best way to not get a promotion was to be white. It didn't really matter if you were a white male or white female, you were probably getting a mediocre to poor review no matter what you had done, so that someone the same race as the director could get the promotion. If you were a female from the same part of the world and were sufficiently subservient, you might also get a promotion, but us uppity white folk were last in line (in addition to being last to leave the building every night).
There are a lot of problems with the culture of Microsoft, and racism *is* one of them, but it's certainly not white-dominant racism. The biggest difference is, as a white male, I don't have a voice if I try to claim discrimination. My recourse is pretty much limited to either "shut up and deal with it" or "find a better company to work for." So, after years of the first option, I finally took the second option. That's white male privilege at work right there... "you're a white male, so you have the privilege to shut up and take it or get the hell out."
It seems to me that claiming that because there are non-white people in Management at Microsoft that Racism therefore cannot be a problem at Microsoft seems as stupid as claiming that because a black man was elected President of the United States, that racism in the United States no longer exists... As you contemplate that last statement, contemplate that the author that wrote it is originally from Charlottesville, VA...
That said and out of the way, my legitimate and sincere question (because I seek to understand) is: How does a white male, legitimately claim discrimination?
Even if Affirmative Action (often vilified as reverse discrimination) were a quota system (which it is not), the proposals I've seen put it at 10%. That's 10% for all non-white people to share, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, and Blacks. Beyond that, if we disregard white women who are for the purposes of Affirmative Action considered to be "minorities" (and beyond that the primary beneficiaries of Affirmative Action), that leaves by definition white people with 9 out of 10 opportunities and everyone else fighting for their piece of the remaining 1 out of 10 opportunities.
Who gets mad that they enjoy 9 out of 10 opportunities instead of 10 out of 10 opportunities?
A lot of people who enjoy the opportunities they enjoy, enjoy them because of who they know or who they are related to, such as is the case with legacy students admitted to colleges and universities, like say self-admitted "C" student George W. Bush who was admitted to Yale because he was the son of George HW Bush. The point here is that many of the opportunities white people enjoy in America have nothing to do with meritocracy and yet they have them. Why is the assumption always that the minority was somehow LESS qualified than the white person that feels (for whatever reason) entitled to their job?
When it comes to the Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and others... many of these individuals come from places where college education and extended college education is free, or even where their high schools are more academically rigorous than many of our colleges and Universities. For many that study in America, some of them earn their way through their extended educations by serving as either teachers or teaching assistants themselves... teaching whites and others in American colleges and Universities. I think they make up about like 5% of the total population, yet like 15% of the college population. They typically score higher on standardized tests. Why shouldn't a global company seeking to open markets around the world stack their management teams with non-whi
I worked there a few years in several divisions (MSR, OSD, Office) and am also baffled by this one. I've seen other big companies and startups that feel like frats and are horrible - but MS was not like that. It had the highest % of women I've ever worked with in a tech company (MSR hugely so). I've asked some ex female co-workers and they were also confused...
Trust me, they treat everyone like that.
Well, perhaps more than white males should take IT courses. Women, by far and large, would rather work in other STEM fields over tech. Throwing in this not so subtle jab just detracts from everything else. It's incredibly racist and sexist.
This is why they don't get the roles... they act like spoilt brats when they don't get the job.. therefore they were not right for the job in the first place.
Wow, so three women in a company of thousands know what happened to 8,630 other women over the last five years? That's almost... unbelievable.
For years I was hoping for M$ to go down, and it goes best way possible. Corporate behemoth who only knows money and and how to bend to interests groups is now being taken down by people who bended it over. You have to remember, feminists have no goals, 'it's not the destination, it's the road'. There is never enough. Next, I am looking at you google. I dated 2 girls who indirectly worked for google. One was mah, second was PROPERLY brain washed and she was 22, fat as a whale(don't judge me, i did not know what pick up artistry was). You gonna fail, just matter of time.
It's the gossip machine working at full force... every chick at every company has this uncontrollable urge to find out and disseminate every possible tiny detail about everyone she can!!!
That's just a normal day!! Heaven forbid you are ever within a 1km radius of one chick telling another she is knocked up or engaged.. dang that's painful!!
....it was common knowledge the fast track to promotion and success if you were female was to work back late and angle into a position where you could suck the bosses dick, both figuratively and literally.
Then you leave to head up Yahoo.
You are not wrong about the outcomes. For years I have seen the decline in innovation of Microsoft products, and their UI's become worse and worse, introducing complexity and non-uniformity until now with Windows 10 you have the biggest pile of steaming turd imaginable. I had a sneaky suspicion that most of Microsoft talent was being leaked to places like google and apple etc. Now with your anecdotes I see the bigger picture, and it fits in with what I've seen from their marketing and high profile presentations.
Your math sucks.
The reality is 10% of jobs (using your numbers) are completely unavailable to white males. Those, by definition, go to unqualified non white males.
The remaining 9 jobs the entire set of white males, including the incompetent ones who don't get 10% of jobs set aside for them, have to compete with the competent non whites.
And as almost anyone who has worked in tech for long enough has seen, once you get a non white non American into a management role that entire part of the company soon turns into a mirror image of that manager's racial background. And still 10% set aside for non whites in environments where whites have already been pushed out.
This is not so called reverse racism. It is just racism, plain n simple.
If you talk about this you are either sexist or virtue signaling, there is very little room for being a geek or nerd in this conversation without being called one of these two things in a polarizing debate, everyone seems to be trying to win instead of settle.
Ok, that said, I want to point out something that seems obvious to me. Much of this conversation revolves around competence instead of interest in the field. Second thing I notice is women have different power structures to men and this is something we have never incorporated in the workplace, as peers, before. So how do you do that?
I'm happy to say, I've worked with competent women early in my career, one a C programmer another a systems administrator and it was great because they were sane and interested in what I was interested in. The power structure was male our relative interests and it worked. No-one thought about it, we were all too busy to notice.
The next relevant example that comes to mind, was my fault. I hired, who I thought, was the best candidate on paper however, in practice she was fucking lazy, excuses, excuses, excuses and a real dead-weight in the team. Plus, she wanted to fuck me, to the point it was almost sexual harassment (not unattractive, I simply wasn't interested in her and the whole woman scorned thing) and all I could see was a manipulative person. Fortunately my boss was a woman and there were no illusions about competency in her mind, she recognized what was happening and she used female power structures to deal with the issue, ended up having her transferred and I had to block her emails, chat and phone. Not as if the project wasn't hard enough.
Last was my external experience of female power structures on competent women. Two females in a dominant role with questionable competence encountering a young, attractive woman competent interested in the technology. Asking intelligent questions, thinking about them, going away to work things out and coming back to discuss progress and next step, I genuinely respected her attitude to learning. The two dominant females absolutely destroyed her self-esteem and she left, it was disgusting, but showed that women have power structures completely different from men.
So, from my observations, if you are going to have women in the team, you need to find a competent matriarch figure aligned with the business that can assert female dominance because, as a man, if you are challenged by a woman you can't assert physical dominance the way you would with a man (men know what to expect from each other) and you are just pathetic if you back down when you are being disrespected. As a man, you really have to be on your game, psychologically, to handle that form of female aggression and maintain your self respect because it is outside of male power structures.
And nothing I've mentioned here even touches on toxic narcissistic people of both sexes in the workplace.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The real culprit in MS is H-1Bs, who are 99% male. They take jobs from women, also from men, and give them Indian cheats.
Indians promote Indians. They promote only Indians of their own caste, of course. They actively seek to damage and destroy Americans. And if an Indian gets into HR, no white people, chinese or non-Indians will ever get hired again. How this is not an EEOC thing is a mystery.
The reality is 10% of jobs (using your numbers) are completely unavailable to white males. Those, by definition, go to unqualified non white males.
By definition they go to people who are not white males; nothing about the definition suggests unqualified. You have made the assumption that nobody qualified gets hired. Also, in the next sentence, you changed qualified to competent. Those words are related but not synonyms.
Then you comically miss the point here:
once you get a non white non American into a management role that entire part of the company soon turns into a mirror image of that manager's racial background
So...you acknowledge that people hire and retain matching their racial background over the competence pool of the society around them? That's *exactly* the point you were fighting against in the rest of the sentence. Most managers in the US are white males. You appear to be claiming that somehow, only white males do not have this problem. That's crazy. Everybody has the problem.
Whether Affirmative Action is the best possible solution is a legitimate point for debate. But your math sucks worse.
They had to create a culture that would enable Bill Gates to get married after all. Otherwise he'd still be around "improving" the product.
https://www.wired.com/2015/10/margaret-hamilton-nasa-apollo/
Think her battle would have been as extensive or that knowledge of her contributions would have been as unknown if she were a man? There is a history of this in technology...
If you'll notice, I actually said that racism is quite a large problem at Microsoft, but it tends to be anti-white (at least, in the orgs I worked in).
For your next question, "Who gets mad that they enjoy 9 out of 10 opportunities instead of 10 out of 10 opportunities?" I would say "everyone, and rightly so." Black, Asian, Mexican, White, all deserve to have access to 10 out of 10 opportunities. Saying that someone should be automatically excluded from a percentage of them because of race is, *gasp*, racism, even if the excluded person is white.
EVERYONE knows that at big companies women are paid MORE than men for the same work; are promoted MORE often; and face a MUCH LESS hostile, toxic, sex-discriminatory environment than that faced by men.
If you claim otherwise, YOU'RE JUST LYING. Everyone sees this. Your credibility is already shot. All you have on your side is power - the power of global capitalism and the power of a repressive regime with the world's biggest Gulag. Yup, Social "Justice" Hypocrites, that's your team.