
Uber's Employee Ratings Put Women at a Disadvantage, Suit Says - rayuela
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-08/uber-s-employee-ratings-put-women-at-a-disadvantage-suit-says
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ardit33
I think this is a more issue of "Stack Ranking", which by itself should be
illegal, but somewhat it is still legal.

While pretty much all employment in the US is "at will" employment, "good
faith" is assumed in the system....

Stack Ranking by default is a "bad faith" system, where the employer, will
fire people, even though the employees were good performers (if you are in a
team of all good performers, it is common place that stack ranking punishes
good performers/employees as well).

It is very similar to the "decimation" system that the Roman Army practiced,
when a particular unit or legion performed bad or cowardly in battle, one in
ten was chosen (via short sticks), and culled to death by their companions.
Very brutal, and can't see how it improves morale even if the unit itself is
actually performing well. (which stack ranking is, constant decimation). This
causes rampant politicking and favoritism to the point that systematic
discrimination arises from it.

~~~
sokoloff
Stack Ranking seems like it should be a perfectly legal method of performance
management. You might choose to not work at a company that practices it, but
why should it be illegal?

It is perhaps a natural fear that a Stack Ranking system would lead to a "Rank
and Yank", but the mere ordering of employees during a performance management
process doesn't give me any particular concern, nor do I consider it a bad
faith system.

In fact, it forces people to make a sometimes hard choice, which I believe has
more benefits than drawbacks to an organization, else you run the risk of
having a massive "undifferentiated middle" and no clear development plans
because you have no feedback from rich discussion about why Jane is better
than Joe; instead Jane and Joe are simply declared to be equal without any
discussion about what Joe could do to improve or what Jane should continue
doing, etc.

~~~
physicsyogi
Microsoft used stack ranking for some time and from what I've read it caused a
lot of problems and was considered to be negative overall. It led to a
cutthroat environment where employees were competing with each other (and not
focusing on doing their best work) so that they would get a good ranking [1].
According to reviews on Glassdoor, it's still used unofficially for their
6-month reviews [2]. Amazon also used it for a time [3] and has since
abandoned it.

1:
[https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-l...](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-
lost-mojo-steve-ballmer) 2: [https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Microsoft-
stack-ranking-Re...](https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Microsoft-stack-
ranking-Reviews-EI_IE1651.0,9_KH10,23.htm) 3:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-
amazon-w...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-
wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html)

~~~
sokoloff
We also used it in the past (pure ranking, no rank-and-yank) and have since
abandoned it.

I thought it was effective in forcing deeper conversations as part of the
comparison process, but became unwieldy and unworkable when we passed about 50
engineers which was a long time ago, so I'm not sad to see it go.

------
jey
Tldr: the claim is that when male managers are faced with stack ranking
employees, they will often choose male reports over female reports due to
sexist bias.

~~~
mfoy_
I think a simpler and better claim would be that:

When managers are faced with stack ranking employees, they will often decide
based on factors not purely related to the productivity or value of the
employee.

\----

That, and as an employee in a stack-ranked organization, you know you need to
be competitive. Not in terms of productivity but in terms of "in the eyes of
your manager"\-- Perception is more important than performance.

Studies have shown that men compete more aggressively than women, on average.
So it's certainly plausible that men enjoy a gender-driven advantage that
isn't purely due to gender-discrimination. Rather, it is the system that is
biased.

This reminds me of that "racist algorithm" debacle.

~~~
alasdair_
>Studies have shown that men compete more aggressively than women, on average.

Studies have also shown that when women exhibit identical "aggressive"
behavior as men, they are labeled more negatively than their male
counterparts.

~~~
AlexCoventry
Studies have also shown that social psychology is a morass of irreproducible
results, so without links to detailed descriptions of their methodologies and
hostile verifications, it's reasonable to be skeptical of these claims.

------
cloudwalking
Many of my friends have stopped using Uber in favor of Lyft. Is this a real
trend, or just something I see in Silicon Valley tech circles?

~~~
chrisseaton
Lyft aren't even available in most places that Uber are, so I can't see it
being much of a wider trend.

~~~
BOBOTWINSTON
Is this referencing outside the US? I travel very frequently to both rural and
urban areas in the US and have yet to find a place where I could not Lyft, but
could Uber.

In fact... I have only been to one place where I could not Lyft, and it turned
out I also couldn't Uber (very rural).

~~~
chrisseaton
Yes I don't think Lyft is available outside the US at all is it? I couldn't
even use it when I was in the US as I don't have a US phone number.

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SamReidHughes
Is it possible to create a performance review system that somebody won't
complain is sexist?

~~~
tptacek
Obviously, yes.

Problems like this are endemic to zero-sum schemes like stack ranking.

~~~
SamReidHughes
How?

Edit: The parent post was edited.

Are other employee evaluation schemes free of appearance of sexism (or actual
sexism), or is it harder to see?

~~~
tptacek
The edit wasn't necessary to support the first sentence. There are thousands
of tech companies, large and small, and most of them monitor employee
performance. Meanwhile: allegations of sexist bias in review processes are
infrequent enough to be newsworthy. QED.

~~~
SamReidHughes
A quick google immediately shows pages like this one [] which frets about
sexism without including the words "stack" or "ranking." It has the usual
citing of questionable concepts like implicit bias, or the Bloomberg article's
"unconscious bias."

What I would like to know is, suppose you need to make a system in a large
organization in an attempt to lay off your 10% worst employees. It's pretty
reasonable to expect sexist rankings, even made by non-sexists, and to also
expect beliefs by individuals, wrongly held, that their personal low rank was
the result of sexism. How do you determine whether an organization's ranking
system is sexist, in which direction, and by how much?

[] [https://blog.impraise.com/360-feedback/how-performance-
revie...](https://blog.impraise.com/360-feedback/how-performance-reviews-are-
reinforcing-gender-bias-5-steps-to-fight-against-it-performance-review)

Edit: By non-sexists, I mean, like, non-garbage people.

~~~
tptacek
You asked a simple, straightforward question with an easily obtainable answer,
which I provided. I'm not interested in the new tangent you're trying to start
here, sorry.

~~~
SamReidHughes
Yeah but your answer was so weak, talking about lawsuits that have made the
news. I have also seen, personally for example, allegations of sexism
regarding employee ratings that didn't turn into a news article about a
lawsuit. That means you can't use notoriety of lawsuits to precede the use of
"QED."

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s73ver_
At this point, any company that thinks stack ranking is a decent idea just
needs to die.

~~~
gozur88
I wouldn't go that far, but I agree stack ranking is a really bad idea.

Uber seems to be full of bad ideas, so maybe it's a good fit.

~~~
mfoy_
Maybe Uber is like an organizational Gaspode[1], in which so many bad ideas
are all running amok at once that it all keeps working, somehow.

[1]:
[https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Gaspode](https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Gaspode)

>is only still alive because the various diseases are too busy fighting each
other to kill him

------
liberte82
Why not normalize the rankings? It seems that at volume, that sexism should be
the only remaining factor when looking at overall averages. Unless you really
believe that "women are worse drivers". Normalize them to the average for each
sex.

~~~
eridius
This is talking about employees, not drivers, and you cannot "normalize" stack
ranking. The whole point of stack ranking is you're putting the employees in
order from best to worst. They're not given numeric ratings.

~~~
liberte82
Guess I should RTFA :)

