29 ms·

Yahoo ex-employee sues, alleging performance review manipulation, gender bias

• trhway 11y ago
  "It also alleges that women were treated better by managers in the media group. While men were immediately terminated after receiving low employee scores, women were allowed to appeal their ratings, the suit says."
  • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Its hard to rectify gender bias without somebody crying foul.
    • trhway 11y ago
      i'd say there are 2 schools of thought here - one is zero-sum game and another is that you can't make somebody more free or equal by increasing oppression or inequality toward somebody else.
      • zorpner 11y ago
        Rectifying inequality will always reduce the advantages of the privileged -- those advantages are the inequality. Whether they choose to pretend that they are now being oppressed or acknowledge that the status quo was unacceptable is up to them.
        • jm_l 11y ago
          That's true in the sense that if A has 50 resource points and B has 40, A has an advantage that is lost when, in rectifying inequality, we redistribute the resource points to 45-45. What is being suggested here, however, is that perhaps it is possible to find 10 extra resource points in the budget and give them to B so that we finish with 50-50.
          • zorpner 11y ago
            is that perhaps it is possible to find 10 extra resource points in the budget and give them to B so that we finish with 50-50. The point is that A will very often perceive this as a negative outcome.
            • kelukelugames 11y ago
              Loss of privilege is often perceived as oppression. On the other hand, the creator of Dilbert just shrugged it off and started a new job each time his employer said they couldn't promote another white male.
              • thatcat 11y ago
                equality requires not a loss of privilege, but an equal distribution of privilege. This means hiring/firing should give an equal consideration to both genders. A 50/50 m/f ratio is not a statistical "proof of equality".
              • Chris2048 11y ago
                Yeah, Rosa Parks shoulda shrugged it off and waited for another bus! Seriously though, 'often' is just a weasel word if you don't specify the context. This might qualify as a mechanism for dismissing valid complaints...
                • kelukelugames 11y ago
                  Are you comparing discrimination against black people in the 50s to what may have happened to a man? A lot of civil rights activists wanted affirmative action too. Often is most of the time. People perceive relative changes as terrible. That's why they arrested Parks instead of agreeing with her.
                  • Chris2048 11y ago
                    Why? It's an analogy, the relevant parts match; There's no rule that says discrimination has to reach a certain level before it should be resisted . Stop derailing my point with irrelevancies. "A lot of civil rights activist" - which ones and why? Maybe their reasoning is sensitive to their particular interest. I understand what 'often' means, I don't agree with it as a generality. Even 'People perceive relative changes as terrible' isn't always true.
        • epx 11y ago
          Trying to do that creates strong non-linearities and the end result is unlikely to create a healthy equilibrium.
    • DannyBee 11y ago
      Err, why not let everyone appeal their rating? (I understand, percentage wise, due to bias or whatever, it's likely a higher percent of things would be overturned for women, but it's not like the error rate for non-women was 0 anyway, so why not just make a process that nobody is going to complain about?)
      • shawn-furyan 11y ago
        In my reading, the description of the process running in this manner is an allegation, not an established fact. So it's not really clear that Yahoo has anything to answer for on this point.
        • DannyBee 11y ago
          Sure, i understand. I meant my parent is complaining that clearly the women can appeal because of gender bias issues affecting them more heavily than men, as if that magically would make it okay. Instead, the thing that seems "okay" on that point would be "let the men appeal too" (IE my parent is wrong no matter what!)
      • codeonfire 11y ago
        What would be the result of that? You appeal and find, oh management really did make a mistake and is incompetent of it's primary purpose of evaluating employee performance correctly. AND, management did in fact discriminate and now has proven it for any and all future and current lawsuits. There is literally no reason for management to allow ratings appeals.
        • knughit 11y ago
          That's like saying there is no reason for a single party government to investigate claims of corruption. Management is not a monolith.
        • spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
          Natural Justice is one - in the UK not having a proper appeal procedure and applying it is normally an automatic "unfair dismissal" And if your a big company and take the piss in court you get the book thrown at you by the Triibuneral see Imarsat a few years ago.
    • walshemj 11y ago
      You don't do it by running a discriminatory discipline regime.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  • munchbunny 11y ago
    Speaking from experience, statements like this are often cases where the actual story was more benign than the perception, and the statement here is the perception, not the actual story. If this is true, then there's a huge problem, but I'm willing to believe (pending more information) that the policy isn't this blatantly sexist, and that the truth is somewhat more nuanced.
    • piker 11y ago
      It's also a lawyer trying to make a prima facie complaint to avoid summary dismissal of a lawsuit. As long as there's a good-faith belief that this could be true, including such an allegation in the complaint will expand the plaintiff's pre-trial discovery breadth. That costs Yahoo more money to defend, increases the likelihood of uncovering a smoking gun and puts the plaintiff in a better settlement negotiation posture.
      • kelukelugames 11y ago
        This is how lawsuits works. Employee has one valid complaint. Lawyer tacks on a dozen more complaints and hope the company settles.
        • munchbunny 11y ago
          Yeah, it's a pity that the system we put in place to make victims whole first asks us to say the worst about everybody involved, victim included. Not that I have a better idea, but I think there's a cruel irony to it.
        • pc86 11y ago
          It's the same in criminal law as well. You allegedly violated a law? Well here are four more that say the same thing in a slightly different way. Oh, you were within 100' of a school? Possibly longer jail time? It was a construction zone, too? Here's another three offenses that open you up to civil litigation as well.
    • jonesb6 11y ago
• timrpeterson 11y ago
  Noteworthy dirth of comments in the normally chatty HN audience. Untouchable subject sadly.
  • krschultz 11y ago
    Wrongful firing lawsuits are incredibly common across all industries. The merit of the case is impossible to figure out from a news article. People can speculate all they want, but really no one knows the facts other than those privy to the actual lawsuit.
    • kelukelugames 11y ago
      Where is the vitriol people directed at Ellen Pao?
      • tetromino_ 11y ago
        IIRC, vitriol started to be directed at Ellen Pao only once she was cross-examined in court, giving specific details, and her claims of discrimination suddenly seemed much weaker than what the media had been reporting before the trial. I would expect exactly the same thing to happen here if the case ever goes to trial and Anderson's testimony in the courtroom doesn't support his initial claims as presented in the media.
        • magicalist 11y ago
          > IIRC, vitriol started to be directed at Ellen Pao only once she was cross-examined in court It certainly increased after the court case began, but certainly some, uh, strong opinions from the start: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4008796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4008796
          • kelukelugames 11y ago
            I read the first thread. People are under informed about discrimination cases. Ending an affair in the workplace is a common trigger for retaliation. Yet, someone argued that a woman was more likely to fabricate complaints after ending a relationship. Who is more likely to be vindictive? The manager or the employee? Most people acknowledge power tends to corrupt. Though Pao did have a few things going against her. Husband wasn't a pillar of the community. The actual case, according to my employment lawyer friend, was weak.
• gosukiwi 11y ago
  Sounds like an awful place to work at.
• moistgorilla 11y ago
  So apparently he had been given a promotion and took a leave of absence to participate in a prestigious fellowship and was fired for having a low performance review? What metrics were they going by for the performance review if he wasn't even working at the time? I have a feeling this lawsuit will actually go somewhere.
  • walshemj 11y ago
    mm yes sounds fishy a bit like women on maternity leave getting a bad appraisal. and allowing only women to appeal sounds like an automatic win on sex discrimination grounds. Sounds like HR had a quota to fill and took the easy route and screwed up.
    • funkyy 11y ago
      Ah yes, to fight with inequality and racism companies now use quotas - a system where they hire based on gender and race.
      • walshemj 11y ago
        No HR had a quota to get rid of x% and took what they thought was the easy target. Its incompetence in Yahoos HR function
    • Shivetya 11y ago
      well there are more than a few companies which sponsor a women's only executive leadership training system/etc. There are all sorts of ways for people in the right positions to drive the company where they want it to go and drive out those they don't want and have it all covered up nice and neat
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • macspoofing 11y ago
    >So apparently he had been given a promotion and took a leave of absence to participate in a prestigious fellowship... That doesn't mean he was competent.
• MollyR 11y ago
  Wow if that's true, this is not the way to reduce the gender gap.
  • tajen 11y ago
    I'm very happy that a lawsuit on male discrimination is happening. Being a male programmer, I have seen many females around me being more promoted than men, in my 3 companies. I cannot determine whether there is actually a discrimination happening, but I can tell that "statistics don't match my experience". So a lawsuit is one way of determining the "truth, according to the law". And on the other hand, there starts to be gender equality if both genders sue equally often for discrimination. It's ironic, but it's positive.
    • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      It could simply be, that your company recognizes talent wherever it finds it. And women flock there because they can succeed there. That would just make it, competition. As society changes, there will be many apparent imbalances. To tell if something is wrong, we cannot just look at statistics. There must be a better test for 'inequality'.
      • tajen 11y ago
        Because women are more talentful? If something irritates me, it's newspapers full of articles saying that women are better at work than men, women lecturing men on being being accordingly stupid, and no quality attributed to men about work or private life, apart from being stronger (yay, stronger, a great brain-dead prejudice). I included your lecturing in my original comment, it's an humiliation that you could think I oversaw such aspects.
        • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
          Nobody said that. Reading the comment again, we see it said "Women flock there because they can succeed there." There would then be many more talented women there than average.
• elgenie 11y ago
  The allegations sound very bad if true, but that's table stakes for a wrongful termination lawsuit. Given the timing, most likely this gets settled for a tidy sum.
• kelukelugames 11y ago
  Anderson also says he may have been terminated because he reported that an employee tried to bribe him to reduce a co-worker's performance score. The lawsuit says that employee had a "personal relationship" with Anderson's manager, who later gave Anderson a low score. This is the most believable line to me.
• maxaf 11y ago
  It would appear that Yahoo had forsaken the three D-s of firing: Document, Document, and Document some more. Employees fired for legitimate cause usually leave behind a trail of evidence wider than the New Jersey Turnpike. This documentation can take many forms, and is astonishingly easy to come by in today's increasingly data-driven workplace. Yahoo's apparent inability to gather evidence is just another sign of a poorly run company. Who will miss them once they've gone for good?
  • paulddraper 11y ago
    You're right about what HR should have done, but you're overplaying the significance towards Yahoo's current position.
• MrTonyD 11y ago
  I would like to see more laws to help create a better work environment for everyone. We all spend most of our time at work -- yet, somehow, we seem to give up every right as a human being when we become employees. I do think that "hire/fire at will" is acceptable - but we should have decent lives and a great social safety net at the same time. After all, we live in a time where incredible wealth is being created (it just seems to be hoarded by the 1%)
  • meric 11y ago
    You think we'll have more wealth if only we made things more equal. But that's not true, because we, software engineers (assuming you're one), are in the 1%. Making a better work environment for most people by making things more equal will likely make a worse work environment for software engineers. Yes, it's a worthy goal, but don't pursue it for the sake of a better work environment for yourself. Be prepared to lose a lot of good things in life. It's only when you're willing to sacrifice your own living standard for the sake of a better environment for most people, you can sincerely tell yourself, you're different to the 0.01%. It's the mindset "We can make our lives better by taking things from some other people not related to us" that's dangerous.
    • specialist 11y ago
      Human society, culture advances when zero sum scenarios are replaced with win/win variants. Where's the joy in having material wealth if I have to step over the homeless while going about my daily business? Or require additional security measures to feel safe? I very much advocate a more equitable society for very selfish reasons. I want to be left alone. The math and logic of reciprocal altruism directly challenges the zealotry of Freedom Markets(tm). But it's just a different kind of selfishness.
      • meric 11y ago
        Yes, I agree. It's important not to chase for an "more equitable society" thinking you can work less, have better stuff, have a better working environment. You're trading extrinsic benefits for intrinsic benefits. Be prepared to be a lot more poorer, as you see the people who are poorest get a little less poor.
• orionblastar 11y ago
  This is a problem in business management. If you want to discriminate against an employee in a certain group, you just give them low scores in a performance review. That way you can claim they are a bad employee to justify laying them off or terminating them. Even if they did nothing to get low scores. It sort of avoids discrimination lawsuits if they can document that the employee got low scores. But this is fishy because he was given low scores while on leave. Something like that happened to me while I was on short-term disability and in a hospital and at home. They had employees sign papers that I was doing all sorts of things to give me low scores. The dates when they claimed I was at work doing those things, I was in a hospital or at home and not at work. When I returned from short-term disability I was put on probation and then fired. They tried to use the stuff against me to block unemployment benefits but the state saw the complaints were on the same dates that I missed work and sided with me considering the complaints were made up. I could have sued for discrimination but it was the best law firm in town, and they could have proven an undue hardship defense because they hired a software consultant for $100/hr to do my job because none of my coworkers could do it. So I would like to see the manipulation of the low performance ratings to be investigated. You see the years prior I had gotten high scores and pay raises, then as soon as I got sick, low scores and complaints.
  • kelukelugames 11y ago
    When did this happen? If it was within the last 300 days then you should take your case to the EEOC. If the dates were made up then this can be a slam dunk. And the EEOC will sue on your behalf if it's a slam dunk.
    • orionblastar 11y ago
      It happened in 2001. Way too late to file now. I ended up on disability in 2003.
  • pc86 11y ago
    I'll be honest, I find this hard to believe. Any employment attorney would absolutely jump at the chance to take a contingency case where there was verifiable proof that a company and coworkers fabricated evidence in order to terminate someone to avoid paying benefits.
• epx 11y ago
  Not judging the merit of the complaints, but trying to "cure" gender imbalances by adding another imbalance will create strong non-linearities, that will attract people that like to exploit these non-linearities instead of attracting true talent. For every individual, every probability is always 50/50 - either something happens, or not. If an individual, a man, is affected negatively by a pro-women policy, he won't forget it for a lifetime. Because he is not a statistic, he is a person that has only one life to live. Personally, if I were affected by this, or a colleague were, I'd find another job immediately, and watch the ship sinking from a safe distance.
  • braythwayt 11y ago
    > Not judging the merit of the complaints, but... And the rest of your comment is just grinding your axe with the biases your brought into the discussion. Now, I could add to that by arguing with you using the biases I brought into the discussion. And neither of us would be talking about this one specific company and one specific employee at that company who had one specific problem, and has chosen to accuse the company of discrimination. This is how “linkbait” works: People are already heavily biased to believe something-or-other, and they charge in and read the post through the lens of whatever they want to believe, and to argue whatever they wanted to argue. If we don’t actually judge this case and this post by the specific merits of a specific claim by a specific person about a specific circumstance in a specific company, we might as well just spin a wheel every morning, read off whatever hot-button topic comes up, and just start commenting.
    • Chris2048 11y ago
      This assumes your biases are as equally valid (or invalid) as epxs. Even if we work this assumption into the definition of 'bias', we only shift the argument to whether epx's assumptions are biases or not; Maybe some biases are borne of empiricism? also I took the above quote to mean that epxs wasn't implying that those assertions were to be applied in this case. Nothing in the post implies epxs was referring to this specific example.
      • 11y ago
• stripemango5 11y ago
  The gender bias this employee claims to have encountered is rampant across SV. At 2 previous tech companies I've encountered the most insane discrimination: senior management openly declaring that they favor women over men, non-whites over whites. I could probably topple one of the companies in which that happened if I took them to court as it would mean them never being able to hire anyone talented again. The thing is, anyone who tries to sue becomes persona non grata in the industry. Friends at one big SV tech company have both independently told me that they google new hires and any hint of something off, especially a lawsuit or anything legal means instant blacklisting from the hiring committee. Should you risk your career just to get even like this ex-Yahooer?
• CryoLogic 11y ago
  I'm very interested in seeing how this case pans out, seeing that he cited "favoring women" as a criteria. In many courts, similar cases like this have been laughed off. In today's world, in many established companies the gender bias (female given priority) is a real form of discrimination. At my University (a top 10), the average female graduates where picked off by Google, MS and the likes - the extremely hard working, talented and passionate grads (male) couldn't even get interviews at big G half the time. It's an interesting world we live in, where discrimination is now being fought with discrimination.
  • x5n1 11y ago
    Google's defense is probably algorithmic.
    • CryoLogic 11y ago
      I don't know if it could be blamed on an algorithm. Some of the companies (MS was one) even hosted parties for the female members of IEEE and ACM. Took them out to their campus, free meals, mock interviews, free swag, networking events. But they where female only events.
      • deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
    • oh_sigh 11y ago
      I'm not a lawyer, but I'm fairly certain you can't blame an algorithm for your hiring practices being discriminatory. Ultimately humans decide to use an algorithm or not.
    • archemike_ 11y ago
      Even if it's algorithmic someone manually wrote it and would have set a preference to the female gender.
      • gansai 11y ago
• jroseattle 11y ago
  It's obvious that many review systems aren't designed to help an employee, but rather provide management with justification to make staffing adjustments while providing CYA cover to all parties involved. Sounds like Yahoo's is really no different in that respect. I have a non-scientific suspicion that performance reviews are going to become the next industry "thing" that prospective candidates evaluate before joining a company. On par with evaluation of benefits, comp structure, etc. We're aiming to improve perf evaluation in my company, and I'll actively promote that with prospective candidates when we begin to see benefit. We want to identify and reward top performers, and provide support to the bottom to enable them to improve. (We're driving toward a culture that views under-achieving performance first as a failure of management.) We want this to be a strength, and something that our teams use throughout their time with us.
  • rewqfdsa 11y ago
    > I have a non-scientific suspicion that performance reviews are going to become the next industry "thing" that prospective candidates evaluate before joining a company. It's not already? The performance review system is something I evaluate very critically before deciding whether to join a company. Use Microsoft-style stack ranking? I'll pass.