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posted by cmn32480 on Sunday October 09 2016, @06:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-hear-the-jingle-every-time-I-read-the-name dept.

This is a new one ...

Another former Yahoo employee has filed a lawsuit claiming that management running the company's "Media Org" was biased against men.

The complaint (PDF) filed by Scott Ard says that Yahoo's "stack ranking" system was "without oversight or accountability" and was "more arbitrary and discriminatory" than stack ranking used by other companies.

The lawsuit claims that Yahoo's Media Org employees were ranked from 0.0 to 5.0 before being subject to a "calibration" process by higher-level management. Ard claims employees weren't told their numeric ranking but were only informed of their "Bucket" ranking, labeled "Greatly Exceeds, "Exceeds," "Achieves," "Occasionally Misses," or "Misses."

[...] The lawsuit's allegations closely mirror those of Gregory Anderson, another male ex-Media Org worker who sued Yahoo in February. Anderson and Ard have the same lawyer, Palo Alto-based Jon Parsons. Discovery is ongoing in the Anderson case, which is currently scheduled for a trial in May.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/yahoo-hit-with-another-lawsuit-claiming-anti-male-discrimination/


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Arik on Sunday October 09 2016, @10:18PM

    by Arik (4543) on Sunday October 09 2016, @10:18PM (#412222) Journal
    "I don't think there's enough women out there to populate even just the popular high attention employers at 50/50 ratio. I mean not in an abstract sense but in a simple numerical count."

    Sure there are. It's just that most of them are not qualified and have no interest. You're still leaving that unspoken but you're figuring it in. Todays SJWs make it a point not to do so. And it's indeed shaking out exactly like GP said. 'Gender parity' has now become a metric, and like all the other metric, if you want to stay employed you will do anything that is not actually against the rules or illegal in order to boost your metric - and be praised for it.

    So, we'll start looking for any excuse we can find to fire a male - and we'll do everything we can get away with to make sure the replacement is a female. Those who push those two lines the hardest without getting busted for something else in the process win - that has become the game many places. EVEN IF your teams performance drops in other ways, it can still be worth it, as that metric may be weighted heavily, and also the people that make certain metrics raise on command are regarded as 'team players' moreso than colleagues whose metrics are better, but don't fluctuate in response to management.

    Now there are women who are motivated to STEM. And one thing I will argue to my last breath is that women who are motivated to study a subject usually do quite well - as well or better than a man, even in a subject men generally do better at. I've seen that many times in my life and I believe it to be true. But the number of women who are really motivated to study and do well in STEM fields are very few. Those women are the ones that people are happy to work with, the ones that really have a passion for it and stay home friday night studying and they've always been there and made real contributions and been appreciated. But there just aren't enough of them, as you say, to get anywhere near parity. So what happens when you institutionalize parity anyway?

    It's very simply, very predictable. Incentives are used to attract more females to the field. These are NOT people with the passion and drive and talent to really want to do this. They are doing it because they have been offered incentives, doh. The remaining 'old school' employees will be asked to pick up the slack and work harder. It's just deepening the long-existing sex biases that it's supposedly aimed at eliminating.

    Oddly enough though, certain fields are still exempt from this social-engineering. No one complains that there aren't enough female trash collectors, or construction workers. Dangerous, dirty, low status jobs are universally male and that's ok. As long as they stay low status, at least.

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  • (Score: 2) by arslan on Monday October 10 2016, @02:18AM

    by arslan (3462) on Monday October 10 2016, @02:18AM (#412266)

    Oddly enough though, certain fields are still exempt from this social-engineering. No one complains that there aren't enough female trash collectors, or construction workers. Dangerous, dirty, low status jobs are universally male and that's ok. As long as they stay low status, at least.

    That certainly is the white elephant in the room isn't it?

    There are potentially light at the end of the tunnel though. Some people are starting to realize that striving to have equity is perhaps better than all out forcing equality and some women leaders - true leaders and not just SJWs, at least the ones here in Oz, are starting to acknowledge that forcing a ratio is counter productive.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 10 2016, @07:46AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 10 2016, @07:46AM (#412343)

    Good points.

    Take for example my wife. I call her the human computer doing most complex algebra math in her head. She is extremely task oriented and writes extremely detailed instructions anyone can follow and pretty good at figuring out how people wrote their instructions wrong. She does not get terribly lost on a computer and can get around pretty good. Prime candidate for being a programmer. She has pretty much negative interest in working with computers or programming them. As in 'hey you would make a good programmer' 'I have no interest in that I want to be an accountant'. She will do good at that too. But you can not force being 'STEM' if you have reason to do it. She has the talent but no drive to do it. I show her simple programs. She gets them but does not care how they work at all. "thats boring".

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday October 10 2016, @11:51AM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 10 2016, @11:51AM (#412378)

    Dangerous, dirty, low status jobs are universally male and that's ok. As long as they stay low status, at least.

    Sometimes I wonder if programming will end up like restaurants.

    The backend chefs and line cooks are mostly (not entirely) male, treated like shit, worked like rented mules, and poorly paid.

    The frontend hospitality squad merely has to look and act nice and is mostly (not entirely) (hot young) female, treated like princesses, hardest work they do is carry a tray of food, and paid like they're gods gift to the earth.

    I could see something like this in programming, SV web frontend companies being all young supermodels giving presentations to other departments and companies and conferences, while "real CS" is done by greasy nerd dudes always under threat of outsourcing to Elbonia for pennies on the dollar.

    Its not as unfair as you'd think, lifetime earnings for the backend workers are enormously higher because at least around there the economy has been depressed since 1970 or so, such that front end employees are all young 10/10 or 9/10 and that means the term of their employment is extremely short. So you get the ant vs grasshopper thing going on where a 60 yr old chef can still be rocking it, but once a bartender-ess hits 30, only looks 8/10 in the yoga pants, its all over she may as well get her real estate license she's never bartending again. Or waitressing.