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

http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-yahoo-lawsuit-20160202-story.html

by mcknz • 10 years ago

198 144 10 years ago

trhway3• 10 years 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."

JoeAltmaier4• 10 years ago

Its hard to rectify gender bias without somebody crying foul.

trhway3• 10 years 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.

DannyBee3• 10 years 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?)

walshemj3• 10 years ago

You don't do it by running a discriminatory discipline regime.

munchbunny2• 10 years 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• 10 years 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.

jonesb6• 10 years ago

Reminds me of the Microsoft quote someone here brought up yesterday, "I've said it before and I'll say it again, we're too damn disorganized to be as evil as you think we are."

Given Yahoo's track record it is much easier to believe this whole mess was due to ineptitude by management/hr, yet sexual discrimination is a much 'sexier' headline so they went with that.. and oh look all the "super smart" people on hacker news still "circle jerk" over it. It's almost like were not a superior community and are quite comparable to the rest of the internet..

timrpeterson• 10 years ago

Noteworthy dirth of comments in the normally chatty HN audience. Untouchable subject sadly.

krschultz• 10 years 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.

kelukelugames10• 10 years ago

Where is the vitriol people directed at Ellen Pao?

vacri• 10 years ago

Plenty of HN stories attract few or zero comments. It's hardly 'noteworthy'. It's not uncommon to have someone complain in an article's comments that "I posted this X weeks ago and no-one noticed"

codeonfire2• 10 years ago

There's nothing to say about HR corruption really except "No shit." Anybody who has had a non-management job has been subject to this type of corruption by corporate HR departments for their entire working lives. The only thing remotely worth discussing is what kind of evidence the company slipped up on and how it plays out.

gosukiwi• 10 years ago

Sounds like an awful place to work at.

moistgorilla• 10 years 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.

walshemj3• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

Ah yes, to fight with inequality and racism companies now use quotas - a system where they hire based on gender and race.

Shivetya• 10 years 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

macspoofing2• 10 years 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.

jlarocco2• 10 years ago

I honestly don't see what you're getting at.

Obviously he was competent enough to get a promotion by whatever metric they were using.

solomone• 10 years ago

Part of that is right out of the Microsoft playbook. Promote you right before the review cycle. Give you a bad review by comparing you to all your peers in your new level. They had a limited number of promotions and good scores to give out. This way they didn't have to give a promotion and high score to the same person.

MollyR• 10 years ago

Wow if that's true, this is not the way to reduce the gender gap.

tajen3• 10 years 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.

JoeAltmaier4• 10 years 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'.

pcurve• 10 years ago

I've seen attempts to promote females to IT leadership positions, usually to high enough levels where they don't have to know code or have strong technical skills. It appears to be a way to balance out field dominated by male. Definitely not openly discussed issue, but it's hard to ignore numbers sometimes.

calibraxis• 10 years ago

The gender bias HN people see — bias against men! You go into a tech workplace all you see is black/latina women... I started wearing makeup and dresses to job interviews. Tanning salon beforehand. The interviewers perk up and ask if I identify as a woman. I sob and admit I'm cismale — but I read everything on Hacker News so I'm probably very qualified! I'm entitled to your company employing me!!

They lower their heads and thank me for my time.

yuhong• 10 years ago

I dislike anti-discrimination laws in general. I think a good compromise would be to limit to manual labor jobs and the like which the laws was originally designed for.

elgenie• 10 years 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.

kelukelugames10• 10 years 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• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

You're right about what HR should have done, but you're overplaying the significance towards Yahoo's current position.

MrTonyD4• 10 years 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%)

meric3• 10 years 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• 10 years 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.

tdeck3• 10 years ago

Very few software engineers are in the top 1% of U.S. earners. That is over $400,000 annual income.

bobby_9x• 10 years ago

"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."

Workers in the IT industry probably have the cushiest jobs in the world. You make way above minimum wage, you aren't risking your life, and your job can be done from the comfort of a heated or cooled office environment.

I'm not sure what rights you think you are giving away as an employee. Employee/Employer relationships are usually legally bound by a contract. You are free to change the contract or question it before you work there.

If you choose not to do this or don't want to take the time and effort into finding another job, it's no fault but your own.

I think what's missing is education. Most people are so complacent, they don't want to read anything they sign and then act surprised when it contains something undesirable.

I've crossed out and questioned plenty of employee contracts. Most businesses will work with you on this.

I also don't know what more laws you want. As a business, you have to be so careful as to not step on someone's toes or offend them or you will find yourself in a lawsuit.

Employees have nearly all the power in today's society (especially with hashtag warriors starting digital riots against companies that do any little thing they don't like), and somehow you think you need more? It just doesn't make any sense to me beyond pure greed and entitlement.

"After all, we live in a time where incredible wealth is being created (it just seems to be hoarded by the 1%)"

Worldwide, you are in the top 1% if you are making more than ~$30,000/year.

I know the current narrative is to punish the 1% for 'hoarding' money and somehow screwing you out of your earnings, but it's just not happening.

MrTonyD4• 10 years ago

"IT industry probably have the cushiest jobs"

This isn't selfishly just about me, this is about what makes sense for our society.

"Employee/Employer relationships are usually legally bound by a contract"

There is a long history of contract terms being set by the more powerful party - and it is almost always workers who need the job and have less power.

"it's no fault but your own"

This completely ignores that opportunities are defined by our society - and the US has very low economic mobility.

"what's missing is education"

For over a decade education has not provided an improved salary in spite of much improved GDP. The perception of better salary has been shown to be lowered salary for the rest of society (excluding the 1% of course.)

"what more laws you want"

We could start by emulating other countries. Denmark workers join Unions which are funded through government. Flexcurity offsets "at will employment" with a great social safety net and free education. Corporatism creates "interest groups" which can be involved with decision-making for employers and industries. Some countries require employees on the board. Some countries only purchase from companies with transparent finances (no offshores). And these are just some techniques proven to work, there are many others which may be a good idea.

hand_of_lixue• 10 years ago

I've crossed out and questioned plenty of employee contracts. Most businesses will work with you on this.

I've given two weeks notice at one job, only to arrive at $new_job and discover that their $parent_company requires you to fill out a digital contract, with no room for appending it. One was smart enough to even make it so that the signature box only accepted an exact match on your name.

The contract they wanted me to sign involved committing perjury on federal forms... but HR promised they would "make a note in my file" about my concern, and still expected me to digitally sign everything.

Now that I'm a seasoned professional who can count on getting work elsewhere, and has some savings, I can just refuse and quit / let them fire me. As someone new coming in to the industry, though, my options were "go along with this" or "desperately hope I could line up a new job before I got evicted" (old job had already filled my position)

Still a hell of a lot better than working retail or call center, but it's definitely not always as simple as "just negotiate a better contract"

Chris20487• 10 years ago

It's worth nothing - Even if the jobs are cushy now, there's no reason this will always be the case. If things change, we might need the protections we negotiate into normality while things were good.

pc866• 10 years ago

I don't want to get too far into pedantic nonsense, but most of your time is not spent at work unless you are working far too much. Even at a full 40 hour work week, that's only 1/3 of your day for a part of the week. Even if you get 9 hours of sleep every night, it's still well under half your waking hours.

For most people, especially us privileged white collar technology workers, the ability exists to show up at work, punch a clock and get something done, then go home and do whatever we want.

MrTonyD4• 10 years ago

If you have a life and job like that, you should definitely hold on to it. It certainly doesn't sound like the past 15 years I've spent in Silicon Valley. With commute and flights and extra hours and company events, I'm confident that work is the biggest component of my life.

orionblastar3• 10 years 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.

kelukelugames10• 10 years 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.

orionblastar3• 10 years ago

It happened in 2001. Way too late to file now. I ended up on disability in 2003.

pc866• 10 years 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.

orionblastar3• 10 years ago

I focused more on getting another job than suing because I had a family and a mortgage to pay to keep the house.

In hindsight I should have sued but I let 180 days go by.

epx2• 10 years 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.

braythwayt2• 10 years 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.

Chris20487• 10 years 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.

x5n12• 10 years ago

Company sinks. Problem solved.

CryoLogic3• 10 years ago

Affirmative action is discrimination, and has strong negative effects on local economies.

Consider a firm which operates at equilibrium (where peak profit is achieved), with a ratio of 80% male, 20% female. Artificially capping the number of males allowed in the corporation, or artificially increasing the number of females pushes the corporation out of equilibrium thus reducing profits in the long term.

On the flip side of the coin, if the firm discriminates (equilibrium 50% male, 50% female but it chooses 80/20) - the economy punishes the firm by reducing its potential profits.

Companies should be hiring on skill, and culture fit. Not to fill a quota or someone's agenda.

It's true that there is a gap within genders in tech - but the answer isn't reducing another equally skilled person's chances of getting the job - this is bad for everyone (except the person who got the job). Instead, we need to look at the root cause and try to learn why the gap is so obvious. Fix the issue at the source, rather than using affirmative action as a bandaid. Maybe it even turns out not to be an issue. Who knows.

tomp2• 10 years ago

Companies should be hiring on skill, and culture fit. Not to fill a quota or someone's agenda.

As opposed as I am to discrimination (including "reverse" discrimination), i have to point out that you're missing part of the picture.

Companies are optimising for profit, and there are many things that influence it. Including, for example, the media - and unfortunately, in the current (pro-female, anti-male) media climate, it pays off to be seen as pro-women - such companies simply get a better media exposure and extra praise! In other words, if the whole country supports discrimination, it might be in the best interest of a company to go along with it.

In general, I don't think we, as a society, should expect companies to influence the culture (in a positive way) - it would have to be the other way around.

gcb0• 10 years ago

it's not true that there's a gender gap in tech.

but since I've been in CA, I've only ever saw the token black guy in every office.

CryoLogic3• 10 years 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.

x5n12• 10 years ago

Google's defense is probably algorithmic.

CryoLogic3• 10 years 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.

oh_sigh3• 10 years 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_• 10 years ago

Even if it's algorithmic someone manually wrote it and would have set a preference to the female gender.

lawnchair_larry• 10 years ago

I've heard rumors that management have set quotas and/or increased monetary incentives for recruiting women at some of the big companies. I have no evidence though.

I've also heard of review manipulation to "rebalance" the buckets if the numbers appear to demonstrate bias.

Anyway, Marissa is certifiably idiotic for adopting the GE/Microsoft stack rank system.

cableshaft• 10 years ago

There are companies with a form of quotas. I won't say which, but they exist. I've known places that require a certain number of resumes from women and minorities (a separate number for each) that must be received and considered for every job opening.

grb423• 10 years ago

I've heard that African-Americans can't be racist because that's a position of abusing power or something. Is it also said that it is a contradiction in terms to discriminate against men?

dragonwriter• 10 years ago

The analagous position (not that i endorse either) would be that discrimination against men isn't sexism because men are in the dominant position, not that it is impossible to discriminate against men.

MCRed• 10 years ago

Interestingly, Google, and the other companies, may be seeking out females in an effort to compensate for under representation among their ranks of current employees.

jroseattle• 10 years 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• 10 years 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.

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

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