San Jose, CAA former Yahoo employee has filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against the Internet giant, claiming gender discrimination, a violation of the California labor law.
Tech companies generally have a 70 percent male, 30 percent female split, which spurred female discrimination lawsuits last year against tech giants Microsoft, Twitter and Facebook. Yahoo is also known as being male-biased but it does fare better than other Internet companies: as of July 2015, 62 percent of its employees were men, comprising 76 percent of leadership roles.
Yet Gregory Anderson, who worked as editorial director for the website for four years until he was fired in November 2014, claims Yahoo discriminated against him, and discriminates against its male workforce. The company’s senior managers routinely manipulated the rating system to fire hundreds of people without just cause to achieve the company’s financial goals, according to the New York Times.
Anderson’s lawsuit claims a number of California labor law violations, including:
• Actual and intentional gender-based discrimination, favoring women when it came to hiring, promoting, and layoffs. The company’s quarterly review process (QPR) permitted employment decisions, including terminations, to be made on the basis of personal biases and stereotyping. The lawsuit claims that managers were forced to give poor rankings to a certain percentage of their team, regardless of actual performance. Ratings given by front-line managers were arbitrarily changed by higher-level executives who often had no direct knowledge of the employee’s work. And employees were never told their exact rating and had no effective avenue of appeal.
• Yahoo did not comply with federal and state WARN laws, which require employers to notify employees of mass layoffs, which was in violation of state and federal laws. (California law mandates that employers give workers 60 days of advance notice if they are planning to lay off more than 50 employees within a 30-day period at a single location.) About 600 other Yahoo employees were terminated in 2014 and 2015 because, like Anderson, they also ranked in the company’s bottom 5 percent, based on the quarterly rating system.
• Yahoo failed to provide copies of the negative peer reviews or other metrics from the rating system the company said it based his termination on.
According to the New York Times, Anderson claimed to have been abruptly fired while on an approved leave of absence to study at the University of Michigan, before which he had received high ratings. He said he was fired for complaining to the management about the effect of the QPR system on people under his supervision and an attempt by one employee to bribe him to reduce the rating of another employee.
Here is the Case 5:16-cv-00527. Yahoo has not as yet responded to the lawsuit.
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