
Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers - prostoalex
http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/10/06/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-led-illegal-purge-of-male-employees-lawsuit-charges/?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#link_time=1475791811
======
iamleppert
Just reading this brought back memories of working at LinkedIn, and why I'll
never again work for a company who has institutional performance review
processes. That pretty much excludes all big tech companies and I'm perfectly
fine with that. The cookie-cutter performance review process is impersonal and
has absolutely nothing to do with helping people do their best work.

In my case, I had a manager who simply didn't like me because I'm gay and used
the performance review process, and eventually put me on an action plan and
forced me to quit.

Most of the big tech companies will put you on something called a PIP, which
is a "Performance Improvement Plan". It basically means they are preparing to
fire you, but they give you an option: quit now, and you can have some
severance, or you could try and stay and complete the PIP, but still run the
risk of being fired for any reason, and in that case, you get no severance.
It's exactly what happened to me, and I decided it wasn't worth the stress to
try and stay and fight it so I just quit.

It was the most demoralizing experience ever, and really showed me that these
processes are in place so managers can just get rid of people they don't want
or like.

~~~
hibikir
That's not really about the review process, but about making one of the
biggest mistakes you can make: After you know your manager doesn't like you,
you didn't do everything in your power to either switch teams or change
companies.

Nothing good will come out of working for a manager that doesn't like you.
You'll get worse reviews than you deserve and worse raises. You'll get less
exposure to other parts of the company: Every second you spend in that
situation is a second wasted.

That said, I am absolutely not putting the blame on you here. A manager that
doesn't like one of their reports should either get over it or do their best
to ship them to a place where they'll be better appreciated. The tech industry
is full of terrible managers though, and you are probably not going to make
yours better.

So the real rule when looking for new jobs is to avoid places where they hire
first and do allocations later, as your picture of what the company is at
interview time might be completely different than what you'll find on day one.

~~~
NhanH
> So the real rule when looking for new jobs is to avoid places where they
> hire first and do allocations later, as your picture of what the company is
> at interview time might be completely different than what you'll find on day
> one.

Oh hey that's actually a whole lot of big corps ... most prominently Google,
isn't it?

~~~
coldpie
My interview experience with Google a couple years ago was godawful and
horribly mismanaged. Just reinforced my conviction to never work for a large
company.

~~~
kafkaesq
Do share, please (if you feel comfortable).

~~~
coldpie
Sure. Set up a date over email for an initial phone screen with the recruiter.
Left work early to make the appointment at home. Recruiter never called. Asked
WTF, got an apology and another appointment for next week. Recruiter missed
that one, too (really). Finally made a connection a few days later, got
bizarre questions like "estimate 2^14 (or something) in decimal". Did poorly
on that, so they forwarded me to another recruiter who passed me on to a
developer for a code interview. I was fairly fed up at this point and not
looking for a job anyway, so I didn't do any interview prep. Interviewer
sounded bored as hell, asked me to implement a graph deep copy algorithm and
some other basic stuff. I haven't done algorithms implementation since
college; I work in the real world where we have Google and libraries. So I
bombed that, too. Got a call a few days later saying they're not interested.
OK, see ya.

Just felt like going through the cogs of a machine that didn't give a shit,
which really didn't give me incentive to give a shit in return. Big companies
suck.

~~~
Grishnakh
Sounds pretty much like my experience with Google. I'm an embedded programmer
with a EE degree, not a CS degree, and they hammered me with a bunch of
algorithm questions like you said. I'm not even interested in (nor qualified
for) heavy-CS type work; I thought maybe they'd want me for more low-level
stuff or doing some kind of work with hardware, custom OS or driver
development, etc.

But as I said above, don't paint all big companies with the same brush.
Google's interviews are not at _all_ like the interviews I've done with a
bunch of other big companies. In many big companies, the different groups work
entirely differently anyway; when I interviewed at Freescale, it wasn't any
different than interviewing at some small company really, and the small
workgroup I ended up working in was a _great_ team to work with, and again
didn't deal that much with the rest of the company anyway. It was a great
experience except for upper management screwing it all up after a couple of
years.

~~~
coldpie
Haha, yeah, I do systems development, not far from your area of work, I
imagine. I have a CS degree, but I hated doing it. Google seemed to be aiming
for CS experts, and I just want to make computers do cool/useful stuff.

Of course, there's other disadvantages to working for big companies. Lots of
dead weight (see: that recruiter I worked with), lots of rules, a lack of
trust, lots of bureaucracy... I'd do it if I have to, but the small company
vibe works way better for me.

~~~
Grishnakh
There's advantages to big companies too: better pay usually, better benefits,
more structure, and in my experience more professionalism. Also the ability to
move laterally is useful. If you're a female or minority you'll probably do
better in a big company too because they're very intolerant of harassment and
discrimination because they can get in legal trouble for it, so they're _very_
proactive about addressing these things early on, providing training for it,
etc., whereas some small companies I've been at seem to have a "good-ole boy"
culture still hanging around. If you can get into the right workgroup, a big
company can be a good experience, but different groups and departments can be
run very differently from each other within the same company.

------
rdtsc
> “We believe this process allows our team to develop and do their best work.
> Our performance-review process also allows for high performers to engage in
> increasingly larger opportunities at our company"

Ok so has that worked out well for Yahoo? Clearly it's been enough time by now
to do an evaluation of Yahoo practices looking back and say something like:
"Yeah thanks to these great management practices we have reconquered market
share / are the new exciting place where everyone wants to work / or we lead
this revolutionary research"? It ended up being owned by a phone company in
the end.

So if Yahoo is a failing company, what they did there, will be associated with
failure. It seems they effectively moved the cause of promoting women in
technology fields backwards. When someone will say "we should find a way to
promote women more" ... "Oh, right, Yahoo was heavily into that, yeah that was
ugly, the lawsuit and all...".

It is a bit like the crazy person advocating for your favorite language or
framework, it's nice to have a fan, but because they are crazy, they are
pushing everyone away with their behavior.

> as well as for low performers to be transitioned out.”

"Transitioned out" ... there is an almost a positive ring to it. "We've
reached out to them, found their pain points and helped them transition out to
a new stage". Is that how everyone talks now? Or is it just me who finds it
grating.

~~~
matt4077
You remind me of that old joke:

When a girl fails in math class, it's "women are bad at math".

When a guy fails, it's "John is really stupid".

~~~
taneq
But when someone says "diversity is automatically good so we'll form a maths
class with mostly women" and that maths class gets poor grades, it doesn't
help further the notion that "more women equals better performance".

~~~
internaut
I think this applies in reverse as well.

When I see a woman running an organization that believes in inequality as a
prerequisite (I'm right wing and I can say that without qualification), here
I'll use the Tories in the UK, then if I see a Margaret Thatcher or a Theresa
May, then I know they have the right stuff.

------
pcurve
“..less than 20 percent female. Within a year and a half those top managers
were more than 80 percent female,”

Even if they were not deliberate about it, they must have talked about how
this might be perceived by employees.

As bad as this issue is, I think hiring friend/referral/former colleague,
especially en mass is much bigger issue that's rarely talked about because
it's not necessarily illegal.

However, I cannot overemphasize how demoralizing it is, especially when they
aren't proven to be any better.

~~~
blazespin
I am OK with this. What annoys me is the discrimination against non asians
happening in the valley these days. I mean, gee wilikers.

~~~
orly_bookz
Surely you mean non-whites and non-asians.

Caucasians are still a huge portion of the Silicon Valley work force. It's
women, hispanics, and african americans who make up some tiny percentage...

~~~
ralusek
Are you so sure that there are fewer women, hispanics, and African Americans
in Silicon Valley because of discrimination, specifically?

------
joeax
I was once a fan of Mayer when she first took over Yahoo, until she led a
crusade against remote workers. As a remote worker myself I can tell you this
crusade sent ripples throughout the industry. A lot of tech companies
(especially outside the bay area) want to emulate the cool kids like Yahoo,
Google, and Apple, and even the company I work for started questioning its WFH
policies.

So no, I don't feel sorry for her one bit.

~~~
dominotw
>this crusade sent ripples throughout the industry

Were there any other companies that followed yahoo's lead?

~~~
shepardrtc
Mine did. But it was a smaller company with about 500 people, who were mostly
older with families. We had maybe 1 full-time remote worker (who was actually
pretty good), and the rest of the people would simply work from home one day a
week. But after hearing about Marissa's crusade, they killed that off. Didn't
change performance, but it did kill morale.

------
aq3cn
Wow, so many different news about the same tech company within a month and now
this one too. They could not have pulled a better stunt to compete with what
Apple and Google is doing in their keynote.

[http://gizmodo.com/7-of-yahoos-biggest-fuck-
ups-1745729341](http://gizmodo.com/7-of-yahoos-biggest-fuck-ups-1745729341)

[http://gizmodo.com/how-yahoo-totally-blew-it-on-
security-178...](http://gizmodo.com/how-yahoo-totally-blew-it-on-
security-1787177844)

[http://gizmodo.com/heres-what-happened-to-all-of-marissa-
may...](http://gizmodo.com/heres-what-happened-to-all-of-marissa-mayers-yahoo-
acqu-1781980352)

[http://gizmodo.com/yahoo-secretly-scanned-users-emails-
for-t...](http://gizmodo.com/yahoo-secretly-scanned-users-emails-for-the-nsa-
and-fbi-1787401845)

[http://gizmodo.com/state-sponsored-hackers-stole-personal-
in...](http://gizmodo.com/state-sponsored-hackers-stole-personal-information-
from-1786958663)

[http://gizmodo.com/sad-yahoo-sale-confirms-that-marissa-
maye...](http://gizmodo.com/sad-yahoo-sale-confirms-that-marissa-mayer-
failed-1784155301)

[http://gizmodo.com/the-internet-is-targeting-yahoo-for-
foste...](http://gizmodo.com/the-internet-is-targeting-yahoo-for-fostering-an-
illega-1755162398)

I almost felt sorry for them when I read articles like that it's the saddest
deal in history as they could got more much money earlier. Now, I feel good
that they are gone. fuff .. gone ..

I need to take care of my Flickr account now.

~~~
spydum
You have to wonder if there is some sort of campaign to smear yahoo? The
timing does seem strange, but perhaps it's simply because they are under so
much scrutiny because of the eventual sale?

~~~
aq3cn
I have these speculations:

1\. Tech giants are making room for themselves.

2\. Their employees (male ones especially) are unhappy with deal, so they are
attacking it.

3\. Verizon is doing this to get discount.

4\. CEO does not care about hiding lies anymore, she wants to be fired to get
her money and may be she has lost control over her employees.

5\. (highly improbable) They want users to delete their accounts due this kind
of bad press.

------
dreta
There’s a reason why people make tons of money playing the stock market
against companies that artificially force gender, or racial equality.

Practices like these are going to ruin your business the same way being
sexist, or racist will. Either you hire the best person for the job, or you’ll
be beaten by companies that do.

~~~
wfo
This sounds great in mythical theoretical free-market land.

But businesses have been making bad business decisions to justify nepotism,
racism, sexism, any other kind of ism you can imagine since the history of
business and I haven't ever heard of competition actually punishing any of
them for it. Markets just aren't that efficient. The job that two different
people for the same job might do just isn't big enough (or, really, isn't
predictable enough) to matter. For every position (yes, even CEO) there are
hundreds of thousands of people who would do a roughly indistinguishable (at
the time of hiring) job.

It's just that culture and regulation change, so the people running businesses
and the laws they have to follow change, so business practices improve.

~~~
yuhong
I suggest a compromise to only include certain kinds of jobs like manual labor
under employment anti-discrimination laws, where workers are actually
commodities that are measureable and interchangeable.

~~~
st3v3r
So tell me, what exact dollar amount do you need to make where discrimination
against you is ok?

~~~
int_19h
I think it's more of a question of how much leverage do you have.

If everyone is discriminating against you, like Jim Crow South, it doesn't
really matter how much you make, because you can't go and find a different job
easily.

But if discrimination is limited, _and_ the job market for this particular job
and in this particular area favors employees, then it's a self-correcting
problem - people will just walk. And if an effective boycott is possible and
will take care of it, why go through the slower and more resource constrained
court system?

~~~
st3v3r
I fail to see why the ability to get a job easily should be taken into account
whether you get to have a legal remedy or not. And quite frankly, I have no
faith whatsoever that a boycott would work, or gain any traction at all. We
have had numerous stories of companies acting shitty all over, and yet they
don't seem to have problems hiring.

~~~
int_19h
Let me clarify that.

I don't actually particularly care about whether the boycott would work or
not, in a sense of preventing the affected company from hiring more people.
What I care about is remedying the material harm that is caused to people
discriminated against.

If you are looking for a job, and they tell you that you needn't apply because
of your race/gender/..., but there are thousands more equivalent jobs in your
market that don't have such restrictions, there's no substantial harm to you -
you can just pick any of those other jobs. If this particular business can
hire enough bigots (or just people who don't care) to keep them running - so
what? It still doesn't harm you. So it becomes a matter of principle, and from
that perspective, I think freedom of speech and association is a more
important principle than private non-discrimination, and so for the lack of
measurable harm, the former should be preferred.

It's not just about jobs, too - same principle applies to services. if you
have 100 bakers around you that aren't bigoted, and one who is, they cannot
cause any meaningful amount of harm to anyone but themselves, by driving
customers away.

Of course, if other businesses take note and start discriminating too, at some
point, there are enough of them that your ability to get a job or service is
hampered - you can't just go elsewhere (not easily, at least). Where and when
that happens, discrimination should become illegal - but localized to the
affected area and/or industry.

Think of it as anti-monopoly legislation. There are many shady practices that
we don't punish businesses for until they are in a market dominant position
(either by themselves, or through collusion with other businesses, which
sometimes can be implicit). Same principle - shady or not, it shouldn't be
prohibited unless it clearly harms someone.

~~~
int_19h
It gets a bit tricky. The problem is that a lot of this kind of stuff is
really pervasive, but there's no conscious collusion. Things like "women are
just not as good at tech" become pervasive cultural stereotypes, and employers
apply them subconsciously, with the result being widespread discrimination
that is obvious in aggregated data, but not necessarily in any individual
case.

So the kind of analysis that's necessary to determine whether legal anti-
discrimination measures are needed or not is rather different from what anti-
monopoly watchdogs usually do.

But yes, something like that _in principle_. A government institution that
keeps track of various metrics and accepts individual reports, aggregates
them, and determines which fields, industries, locations etc need anti-
discrimination enforcement with teeth. Presumably with some sort of due
process where this can be challenged etc, but ultimately, the decision should
be made on the basis of whether there is discrimination or not, and not on
whether it's intentional or not.

~~~
yuhong
It is often the case that the discrimination is pervasive, but not that it is
difficult for women for example to find jobs. If deliberate collusion makes it
difficult for women to find jobs, that would be when I would suggest anti-
trust regulators to be involved. This may include for example anti-
discrimination restrictions in consent decrees.

~~~
int_19h
It's not just about being able to find a job. It's about being able to find a
job that pays the same money for the same skill & experience, and offers the
same career opportunities in the future.

Based on the statistics that we have, it's definitely a problem, at least in
the tech sector.

------
hueving
This is ultimately the result of things like 'implicit biases' training that
tell you to accept that you are unfairly subconsciously advantaging majorities
and that you should explicitly disadvantage them to make up for your biases.
Disgusting.

~~~
dankohn1
Implicit bias is a real phenomenon backed up by good studies:
[http://www.vox.com/2014/12/26/7443979/racism-implicit-
racial...](http://www.vox.com/2014/12/26/7443979/racism-implicit-racial-bias)

Whether or not reverse discrimination was taking place at Yahoo, it is
worthwhile to try to reduce the implicit bias we practice in our own lives.

~~~
Veen
It's not reverse discrimination; it's just discrimination.

~~~
dankohn1
Yes, reverse discrimination[0] is an example of discrimination.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_discrimination](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_discrimination)

~~~
Veen
I object to the term because of this, from the article you linked to:

> In a narrower sense, it refers to the specific negative impacts Whites or
> males may experience because of affirmative action policies. The two
> meanings are often conflated, which leads to confusion and misinformation.

As companies try to fight historical biases, there will be some from the
dominant group that suffer — those that might have been promoted under the old
biased system won't be under a new less biased system. Advantages that the
dominant group had will naturally be eroded. That's all well and good; an
inevitable and desirable consequence of progress in the right direction.

However, if the Yahoo! figures from the article are right, this seems to be a
case of active discrimination against male employees, which isn't the same
thing at all.

Calling them both "reverse discrimination" elides the difference between those
two possible meanings. So I prefer to think of what we're discussing here as
active discrimination of no substantive difference to the usual historical
discrimination. In Yahoo! some female managers were the dominant group — they
had the power — and they used that power to discriminate against male
employees to fill the ranks with other women. That's straight-up
discrimination.

Of course, the whole thing might be nonsense, but we'll have to wait and see.

------
meddlepal
Yahoo is in full self-destruct mode this week.

~~~
baby
Someone could wonder if all this is being triggered by people with an agenda.

~~~
meddlepal
To what end? Yahoo is dead and being purchased by Verizon already for an
agreed upon price. I guess they could back out, but that seems unlikely.

~~~
sytse
Not totally unlikely [https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/06/report-verizon-
wants-1-bil...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/06/report-verizon-
wants-1-billion-discount-after-yahoo-privacy-concerns/)

~~~
DiabloD3
Another version of the story made it to the HN frontpage:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12657576](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12657576)

------
argonaut
I'm extra-suspicious of this lawsuit because of the opportunistic timing. He
was fired in January 2015, more than 1.5 years ago. And yet the lawsuit is
only filed now during Verizon's process of closing its acquisition of Yahoo.
Whether or not he has a case, his motives now have an antagonistic taint
because he no doubt timed this to maximize the PR damage and his chances of
getting a quick settlement.

~~~
matt4077
If the article is a good preview of the case, it does seem to be bullshit...
The mechanism by which this discrimination supposedly happen was the stack
ranking feedback system.

Now I believe stack ranking is stupid and somewhat cruel. But I don't see how
it allows more discrimination than other grading systems. The lawsuit also
doesn't claim intent and it'd be quite a stretch to assign liability to the
CEO for hard-to-prove unintentional side effect.

~~~
apr
Now, once the lawsuit is filed, he gets to do discovery. And if some exec at
Yahoo has ever said something over email to the effect of aggressively
promoting women, and, given the current set of beliefs in the Valley, it is
hard to believe nothing would turn up, the guy might have struck gold here.

------
grawlinson
With all the hubbub surrounding Mayer/Yahoo, why hasn't the board or
shareholders fired her?

~~~
matt4077
Mostly because there are people with opinions that differ from the hn/reddit
echo chamber.

Nobody denies that yahoo failed, but most people also believe that it's fate
was sealed the day it refused to buy google, and that she did about as well as
anybody would have.

...but also: she'd get a 60$ million bonus if fired, and considering that
yahoo has already lost 90% of its former value and is being sold of, people
probably stopped caring.

~~~
CalChris
Yahoo refused to buy Google? I don't remember that.

In 2000, when Yahoo signed the deal to use Google search results, they also
made an investment as well. IIRC, they sold that when Google went public.
Obviously, Yahoo made a ton on that.

~~~
josephg
Larry and Sergey tried selling their pagerank engine to Yahoo back in 1998,
before they formed Google. Yahoo wasn't interested. They founded google as a
fallback plan after being turned down.

------
staticelf
Marissa Meyer seems like a really bad CEO.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
She's basically in the spot Fiorina was in - the ship is slowly taking on
water for Schumpeterian life cycle reasons.

~~~
gspetr
I'm not sure why you wish to remove agency and assign victimhood here. She
knew the job was difficult when she took it.

Speaking of Fiorina, there was a guy who was a CEO of a company taking tons of
water too. He turned it around. And then he won the primary in which Fiorina
also ran.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
I wasn't assigning victimhood that I know of - Yahoo is just an older company.
My read is that they'd have had to have pivoted pretty sharply. We tend to
assign praise or blame on people who pivot depending on how it works out, but
it's just not clear that anyone ( except perhaps a very select few ) is simply
better at that than anyone else. It's as much gambling as it is playing a
game.

I am not 100% sure which primary you refer to, but McCain never turned any
company around and Trump has just pivoted to being a floating brand. He's left
a trail of wreckage in his wake but still gets to claim otherwise. I don't
hold bankruptcy against anyone but you don't then get to construct an "I'm a
winner" narrative from that. At least his communications style is that of a
con man.

Now, in America, the phenomenon of Perfesser Harold Hill is really a thing - a
"jasper" who does good without being good - but the narrative there doesn't
work, either.

------
leaveyou
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.

~~~
ComodoHacker
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
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.

~~~
paulcole
You had no problem with them being 80% male?

~~~
leaveyou
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.

------
drawkbox
We live in a "free" and democratic society but when you work at mid-large
companies they are all basically idealistic dictatorships with brown shirts
running the ranks. It really is a conundrum in some places.

------
zhai88
Worked for a high tech company in the US that hired mostly ethnic Asian people
especially immigrants from China, Japan, Korea because most were single or
came over alone and would work 12 hours, weekends, etc. THey did not protest,
maybe could not protest because of whatever visa they were on. CEO was from
China, family members in senior positions at the company etc.

------
dschuetz
Does anyone here even use Yahoo's products or services? I wonder why Yahoo is
still significant and why there are stockholders dumb enough to stay. Yahoo is
a sinking ship, imho.

~~~
grawlinson
Yes. I used Flickr before Yahoo purchased it, and have watched Yahoo ruin it.

I've tried alternatives (Instagram, 500px) but keep coming back to Flickr
because I just prefer it to the rest.

Over the last couple of months, I have started migrating my photos/contacts to
other photo sharing networks in anticipation of the eventual straw that broke
the camels back.

~~~
dschuetz
So did I. Same goes for Tumblr.

------
Moshe_Silnorin
This seems to be a self-policing crime.

------
inmemory_net
As an example of the rot in Yahoo, the Yahoo Finance Message Boards don't work
in IE 11.

------
roflchoppa
does anyone have links to go to court documents that have been filed?

------
jtedward
>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.

This is buried in the very last line of the article.

------
bajsejohannes
Better title: "Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer accused of illegal purge of
male workers". An accusation is very different from a verdict.

------
Steeeve
There's a bizarre amount of negative Yahoo news lately, and a lot of it
references Mayer directly.

I wonder if Verizon isn't trying to shed her and her departure bonus.

------
JoeAltmaier
This whole thread is deeply disturbing. The bald statement in the headline is
deeply disturbing. The fundamental assumption that women can't possibly be
deserving of management positions. That any objective measure of performance
would certainly favor men. That any man that loses his job _to a woman_ has
been treated unfairly.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
It's not just any man...it was a lot of men.

This kind of discrimination could be excused if it brought a tangible value to
the company, but this reshuffling did nothing to help this ailing company.

Meyer's actions were discriminatory at worst; at best, it was merely gross
incompetence.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Lots of companies fail to survive Silicon Valley forever. Yahoo!'s future
aside, the conversation was about promotion, not ailing companies.

A lot of women are routinely overlooked in management promotions. Since its
80% (or usually much more) men in every other company in Silicon Valley, we'll
have to call discrimination and incompetence at all of them?

The assumption that _women can 't possibly belong in management_ is galling.
No mystery why Silicon Valley has the reputation it does.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
>The assumption that women can't possibly belong in management is galling. No
mystery why Silicon Valley has the reputation it does.

You're putting a lot of words in other people's mouths in this thread, and I
believe you are equating skepticism and discomfort from the lawsuit's
allegations with willful ignorance or even sincere sexism.

If a CEO wishes to fire half the company and hire new people, sure. If the CEO
wants to fire half the company (who happen to be men) and replace them with
new people (who happen to be women), again, sure.

If a CEO implements a review system designed to illegitimize honest work by a
cohort of people and have them demoted and/or fired to minimize severance
costs while bringing on or promoting people of a different cohort, then we
have a discrimination problem.

Honestly I am a little surprised at the accusations of sexism towards people
that are expressing discomfort with what appears to be a primarily sexist act.

~~~
shagie
One of the things that has been only lightly touched upon:

> ... and have them demoted and/or fired to minimize severance costs ...

Tangential to this was the violation of the California and federal WARN act.
Yahoo reduced the workforce by 600 employees without declaring the
corresponding reduction in force under WARN acts.

If a company has 100 (federal) or 75 (California) or more full time employees
that have been employed for 6 of the past 12 months and lays off 50 or more
employees during a 30 day period, the employer falls into the WARN act.

This also isn't something that's new at all - its been brewing for months.
[http://www.californialaborandemploymentlaw.net/2016/yahoo-
ac...](http://www.californialaborandemploymentlaw.net/2016/yahoo-accused-warn-
act-violations/) is from March 6th.

