7 ms·

I'm deeply offended by this and personally I will cease to use Yahoo Mail. I urge any self-respecting males to stop using any of Yahoo services as a form of pro

I'm deeply offended by this and personally I will cease to use Yahoo Mail. I urge any self-respecting males to stop using any of Yahoo services as a form of protest for this despicable act of discrimination. And I'm serious; too much is too much.

petre 10y ago
Yahoo services are pretty much low quality anyway. Flickr is okay but it doesn't really work on mobile w/o installing their app. So why use them anyway? You don't need this as a reason when there are already better services out there. Plus Mayer will probably be pretty much gone soon, since instead of saving what was left of Yahoo, she made it even less relevant than before. It will be probably bought by Verizon.
ComodoHacker 10y ago
So you judge mere on the fact that some lawsuit was filed? Without hearing, without proofs presented, without looking into other party's version? Perhaps this is exactly what someone is expecting from you now.
- leaveyou 10y ago
  I don't deny that the situation must be analyzed carefully but going from "less than 20 percent female" to "more than 80 percent female" in less than 2 years leaves little room for doubt. Also this adds up to the undisclosed security breach and the fact that Yahoo secretly scanned emails for US Intel.. Not a very defensible behavior.
  - geofft 10y ago
    Going from less than 20 percent female to more than 80 percent female is being exactly as discriminatory, though. You should have been offended all along, right?
    - yolesaber 10y ago
      No you don't get it. When men get their jobs its because of their hard work and abilities. When women get jobs its because of mass discrimination against males! /s
    - int_19h 10y ago
      Not necessarily. If your candidates are 80% men and 20% women, and your hires are 80% men and 20% women, your process isn't discriminatory. DIscrimination is still happening, but it's somewhere before you in the pipeline. Some would argue that you have an ethical obligation to "reverse discriminate" to mitigate it, but that's much more ambiguous than plain discrimination being bad. On the other hand, if your company goes from 80%/20% to 20%/80% in 2 years, it's the difference that is very suspicious. Either you're deliberately discriminating (possibly "reverse discriminating"), or the distribution of candidates changed that much, or you have removed glaring discrimination that existed before. Either way, you need more numbers to judge. Oh, also - this all makes sense if we're talking about a sufficiently large sample. If it went from 8 men and 2 women to 8 women and 2 men, I wouldn't be comfortable making any conclusions - on a sample that small, I would expect individual differences to dominate.
      - geofft 10y ago
        > If your candidates are 80% men and 20% women, and your hires are 80% men and 20% women, your process isn't discriminatory. DIscrimination is still happening, but it's somewhere before you in the pipeline. Some would argue that you have an ethical obligation to "reverse discriminate" to mitigate it, but that's much more ambiguous than plain discrimination being bad. I'm not (right now) interested in ethical obligations to discriminate or reverse discriminate or anything. I'm interested in hiring the best candidate for the job. If your candidates are 800 men and 200 women, and you need to hire the 100 best candidates from that pool, you have very little to believe that the 100 best candidates are roughly 80 men and 20 women. You have even less reason to believe that if you have a suspicion that there's discrimination happening in the pipeline. So if your goal is hiring the best candidate for the job, you shouldn't look at the ratios of demographics coming out of a known-biased pipeline at all. If you end up hiring 80 men and 20 women, you should have your own reason why four times as many men than women were in the set of best qualified people. If your goal is some vague social-justice politically-correct nonsense like ending reverse discrimination, then you care about putting the blame on the pipeline and slavishly following the numbers it gives you.
  - paulcole 10y ago
    You had no problem with them being 80% male?
    - leaveyou 10y ago
      I had no problem with it, why would I have ? Some workplaces have 99% men, others 99% women but very few workplaces fire out 60% of their employees just because their gender is not trendy anymore.
    - umanwizard 10y ago
      Is there any evidence that that is due to sexism?
- hueving 10y ago
  You're right, the 80 percent female just matched the gender ratio of the broader industry. /s
  - geofft 10y ago
    1. Just as much as the 20 percent male did. This is middle management, and the ratio is roughly 50%. 2. How is the gender ratio of the broader industry relevant here? If everyone discriminates, is it okay to discriminate? Maybe these women were just better at their jobs than the male candidates. Anecdotally, the average woman I've worked with is far more competent than the average man I've worked with. Are you willing to deny fundamental but politically-incorrect gender differences in your social justice crusade?
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - int_19h 10y ago
      > This is middle management, and the ratio is roughly 50%. Can you cite any sources for said ratio, for middle management in IT? I'm genuinely curious - I don't know the numbers, but I also find it hard to believe, just on the basis of the distribution that I've seen in various places where I worked.
- romanovcode 10y ago
  "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" Taken from the article, do you really need more proof?
  - mcguire 10y ago
    Also from the article: "Yahoo’s diversity reports indicate that the percentage of women in leadership positions at the company rose slightly to 24 percent in 2015 from 23 percent in 2014."
- jbmorgado 10y ago
  When you have an hard fact like: In one year the administration when from 20% female to 80% female. You can come up with all the legal mumbo jumbo you want and with your handsomely paid lawyers you can even win the lawsuit, but it's obvious they where guilty of sexual discrimination, you don't need a court ruling to understand that.
  - paulcole 10y ago
    So weren't they guilty when it was 80% male, too?
    - jbmorgado 10y ago
      Why, did they remove almost all the woman there in 1 year to change it for men? Talk about apples and oranges. Besides, do yourself a favour: Just walk into any Computer Science major class, check the number of woman/men there and let us all know how much they go above those 20% and go check the numbers in the previous years while the board of Yahoo (and any major company in that area) was being built. Ok?
      - ska 10y ago
        I don't know who is in the wrong or right at Yahoo (or if it's even that simple), but you really aren't thinking about this very carefully. There is a obvious rational path for them to get there. I'm not saying it is correct, mind you, or that the implementation would be a good idea. I'm saying that the statements to the effect of "well obviously it was discrimination" are sloppy. The obvious path looks something like this. 1) Become convinced that there has been a systematic bias in hiring and promotion that has promoted one class of workers in your organization (in this case, men) above their merit. 2) Become convinced that this has led to an inversion of talent in your reporting structure (in this case, many women in your company working for less capable male bosses). 3) Believe that the structural problem represented threatens the effectiveness of the company. If you truly believe these three things to be true (and they are all at least plausible, there is nothing terribly far fetched in the above), then you act as in any other structural problem - you re-organize. If you believe you have an untapped layer of female talent in your organization due to systemic discrimination, it absolutely would be in your company and shareholders best interest to try and redress that. Again, I'm not saying it is correct. I'm just saying that "well obviously it has to be discrimination" is either lazy or inept - and that it surprises me to see it echoed here so many times. To your last paragraph, CS majors are a very poor proxy for competent management, and using previous make up is only useful if you assume that was not exhibiting the same bias you are trying to correct.
omgtehlion 10y ago
Wait, you were still using yahoo? It's 2016, dude
- leaveyou 10y ago
  but dude, what about that extremely common corner case, like if you gave your 2001 yahoo email to a very large number of people and institutions ? what do you do then dude ? no, seriously, how do you migrate and email (because I'm about to try it)?
  - maverick_iceman 10y ago
    Forward to gmail.
    - ebalit 10y ago
      Better still, forward it to alias@yourdomain.com that forward to Gmail or another email provider. Now you own your email address, just in case Google disappoint you in the future.
conradfr 10y ago
You weren't offended when they (supposedly) scanned all emails for the NSA?
- orly_bookz 10y ago
  Or the fact that it has been a spam-riddled POS for about a decade now?
yolesaber 10y ago
Of course someone who uses the term 'self-respecting males' is still using Yahoo mail.
JoeAltmaier 10y ago
But it was ok when 80% men were in charge. No laptop rage then. No calls of boycott for discrimination. No sir; men are naturally in charge and anything else is a subversion of the natural order. This whole thread is disturbing at a very basic level.
- talmand 10y ago
  Is the claim that back when it was 80% men they were hired in those numbers simply because of their gender?
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    No claim. Just astonished at the assumption implicit in this thread, that it can't be correct that 80% of competent managers at Yahoo! are female.
    - talmand 10y ago
      I don't necessarily think the complaint is that they are incompetent because they are female. The complaint of gender bias is still valid even if the people who benefited from the bias are fully capable of the job. If it can be shown that the 80% women were not hired based on gender bias then the complaint is unjustified.
      - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
        Do we go looking for that gender bias when its 80% men? Again, women have to prove they belong; the assumption is there has to be some bias or they would not be in those positions.
        wfo 10y ago
        Yes of course we do. Do you read the same Internet that I do? You can't open a single web page without reading something about gender discrimination in tech and how it's biased and unfair against women. You can't walk into a college campus in the country and not see companies and universities bending over backwards to try to force more women into tech to reverse the trend. There are programs, scholarships, engagement programs, all specifically for women because the entire community acknowledges and understands the bias. Firing or demoting 60% of your workforce instantly so you can reverse the extreme inequality into a mirror in the other direction is discrimination as well, but it is explicit and direct, not implicit and insidious which is why people are offended. But you realize this.

petre 10y ago

Yahoo services are pretty much low quality anyway. Flickr is okay but it doesn't really work on mobile w/o installing their app. So why use them anyway? You don't need this as a reason when there are already better services out there. Plus Mayer will probably be pretty much gone soon, since instead of saving what was left of Yahoo, she made it even less relevant than before. It will be probably bought by Verizon.

ComodoHacker 10y ago

So you judge mere on the fact that some lawsuit was filed? Without hearing, without proofs presented, without looking into other party's version? Perhaps this is exactly what someone is expecting from you now.

leaveyou 10y ago
I don't deny that the situation must be analyzed carefully but going from "less than 20 percent female" to "more than 80 percent female" in less than 2 years leaves little room for doubt. Also this adds up to the undisclosed security breach and the fact that Yahoo secretly scanned emails for US Intel.. Not a very defensible behavior.
- geofft 10y ago
  Going from less than 20 percent female to more than 80 percent female is being exactly as discriminatory, though. You should have been offended all along, right?
  - yolesaber 10y ago
    No you don't get it. When men get their jobs its because of their hard work and abilities. When women get jobs its because of mass discrimination against males! /s
  - int_19h 10y ago
    Not necessarily. If your candidates are 80% men and 20% women, and your hires are 80% men and 20% women, your process isn't discriminatory. DIscrimination is still happening, but it's somewhere before you in the pipeline. Some would argue that you have an ethical obligation to "reverse discriminate" to mitigate it, but that's much more ambiguous than plain discrimination being bad. On the other hand, if your company goes from 80%/20% to 20%/80% in 2 years, it's the difference that is very suspicious. Either you're deliberately discriminating (possibly "reverse discriminating"), or the distribution of candidates changed that much, or you have removed glaring discrimination that existed before. Either way, you need more numbers to judge. Oh, also - this all makes sense if we're talking about a sufficiently large sample. If it went from 8 men and 2 women to 8 women and 2 men, I wouldn't be comfortable making any conclusions - on a sample that small, I would expect individual differences to dominate.
    - geofft 10y ago
      > If your candidates are 80% men and 20% women, and your hires are 80% men and 20% women, your process isn't discriminatory. DIscrimination is still happening, but it's somewhere before you in the pipeline. Some would argue that you have an ethical obligation to "reverse discriminate" to mitigate it, but that's much more ambiguous than plain discrimination being bad. I'm not (right now) interested in ethical obligations to discriminate or reverse discriminate or anything. I'm interested in hiring the best candidate for the job. If your candidates are 800 men and 200 women, and you need to hire the 100 best candidates from that pool, you have very little to believe that the 100 best candidates are roughly 80 men and 20 women. You have even less reason to believe that if you have a suspicion that there's discrimination happening in the pipeline. So if your goal is hiring the best candidate for the job, you shouldn't look at the ratios of demographics coming out of a known-biased pipeline at all. If you end up hiring 80 men and 20 women, you should have your own reason why four times as many men than women were in the set of best qualified people. If your goal is some vague social-justice politically-correct nonsense like ending reverse discrimination, then you care about putting the blame on the pipeline and slavishly following the numbers it gives you.
- paulcole 10y ago
  You had no problem with them being 80% male?
  - leaveyou 10y ago
    I had no problem with it, why would I have ? Some workplaces have 99% men, others 99% women but very few workplaces fire out 60% of their employees just because their gender is not trendy anymore.
  - umanwizard 10y ago
    Is there any evidence that that is due to sexism?
hueving 10y ago
You're right, the 80 percent female just matched the gender ratio of the broader industry. /s
- geofft 10y ago
  1. Just as much as the 20 percent male did. This is middle management, and the ratio is roughly 50%. 2. How is the gender ratio of the broader industry relevant here? If everyone discriminates, is it okay to discriminate? Maybe these women were just better at their jobs than the male candidates. Anecdotally, the average woman I've worked with is far more competent than the average man I've worked with. Are you willing to deny fundamental but politically-incorrect gender differences in your social justice crusade?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - int_19h 10y ago
    > This is middle management, and the ratio is roughly 50%. Can you cite any sources for said ratio, for middle management in IT? I'm genuinely curious - I don't know the numbers, but I also find it hard to believe, just on the basis of the distribution that I've seen in various places where I worked.
romanovcode 10y ago
"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" Taken from the article, do you really need more proof?
- mcguire 10y ago
  Also from the article: "Yahoo’s diversity reports indicate that the percentage of women in leadership positions at the company rose slightly to 24 percent in 2015 from 23 percent in 2014."
jbmorgado 10y ago
When you have an hard fact like: In one year the administration when from 20% female to 80% female. You can come up with all the legal mumbo jumbo you want and with your handsomely paid lawyers you can even win the lawsuit, but it's obvious they where guilty of sexual discrimination, you don't need a court ruling to understand that.
- paulcole 10y ago
  So weren't they guilty when it was 80% male, too?
  - jbmorgado 10y ago
    Why, did they remove almost all the woman there in 1 year to change it for men? Talk about apples and oranges. Besides, do yourself a favour: Just walk into any Computer Science major class, check the number of woman/men there and let us all know how much they go above those 20% and go check the numbers in the previous years while the board of Yahoo (and any major company in that area) was being built. Ok?
    - ska 10y ago
      I don't know who is in the wrong or right at Yahoo (or if it's even that simple), but you really aren't thinking about this very carefully. There is a obvious rational path for them to get there. I'm not saying it is correct, mind you, or that the implementation would be a good idea. I'm saying that the statements to the effect of "well obviously it was discrimination" are sloppy. The obvious path looks something like this. 1) Become convinced that there has been a systematic bias in hiring and promotion that has promoted one class of workers in your organization (in this case, men) above their merit. 2) Become convinced that this has led to an inversion of talent in your reporting structure (in this case, many women in your company working for less capable male bosses). 3) Believe that the structural problem represented threatens the effectiveness of the company. If you truly believe these three things to be true (and they are all at least plausible, there is nothing terribly far fetched in the above), then you act as in any other structural problem - you re-organize. If you believe you have an untapped layer of female talent in your organization due to systemic discrimination, it absolutely would be in your company and shareholders best interest to try and redress that. Again, I'm not saying it is correct. I'm just saying that "well obviously it has to be discrimination" is either lazy or inept - and that it surprises me to see it echoed here so many times. To your last paragraph, CS majors are a very poor proxy for competent management, and using previous make up is only useful if you assume that was not exhibiting the same bias you are trying to correct.

omgtehlion 10y ago

Wait, you were still using yahoo? It's 2016, dude

leaveyou 10y ago
but dude, what about that extremely common corner case, like if you gave your 2001 yahoo email to a very large number of people and institutions ? what do you do then dude ? no, seriously, how do you migrate and email (because I'm about to try it)?
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  Forward to gmail.
  - ebalit 10y ago
    Better still, forward it to alias@yourdomain.com that forward to Gmail or another email provider. Now you own your email address, just in case Google disappoint you in the future.

conradfr 10y ago

You weren't offended when they (supposedly) scanned all emails for the NSA?

orly_bookz 10y ago
Or the fact that it has been a spam-riddled POS for about a decade now?

yolesaber 10y ago

Of course someone who uses the term 'self-respecting males' is still using Yahoo mail.

JoeAltmaier 10y ago

But it was ok when 80% men were in charge. No laptop rage then. No calls of boycott for discrimination. No sir; men are naturally in charge and anything else is a subversion of the natural order. This whole thread is disturbing at a very basic level.

talmand 10y ago
Is the claim that back when it was 80% men they were hired in those numbers simply because of their gender?
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  No claim. Just astonished at the assumption implicit in this thread, that it can't be correct that 80% of competent managers at Yahoo! are female.
  - talmand 10y ago
    I don't necessarily think the complaint is that they are incompetent because they are female. The complaint of gender bias is still valid even if the people who benefited from the bias are fully capable of the job. If it can be shown that the 80% women were not hired based on gender bias then the complaint is unjustified.
    - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
      Do we go looking for that gender bias when its 80% men? Again, women have to prove they belong; the assumption is there has to be some bias or they would not be in those positions.
      - wfo 10y ago
        Yes of course we do. Do you read the same Internet that I do? You can't open a single web page without reading something about gender discrimination in tech and how it's biased and unfair against women. You can't walk into a college campus in the country and not see companies and universities bending over backwards to try to force more women into tech to reverse the trend. There are programs, scholarships, engagement programs, all specifically for women because the entire community acknowledges and understands the bias. Firing or demoting 60% of your workforce instantly so you can reverse the extreme inequality into a mirror in the other direction is discrimination as well, but it is explicit and direct, not implicit and insidious which is why people are offended. But you realize this.