I'm very interested in seeing how this case pans out, seeing that he cited "favoring women" as a criteria.<p>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.<p>It's an interesting world we live in, where discrimination is now being fought with discrimination.
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?<p>I have a feeling this lawsuit will actually go somewhere.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
"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."
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.<p>Even if they did nothing to get low scores.<p>It sort of avoids discrimination lawsuits if they can document that the employee got low scores.<p>But this is fishy because he was given low scores while on leave.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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%)
<i>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.</i><p>This is the most believable line to me.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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?
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.