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Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

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Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#201

Post by ska »

jbmorgado wrote: post #185
paulcole wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So weren't they guilty when it was 80% male, too?

Why, did they remove almost all the woman there in 1 year to change it for men? Talk about apples and oranges. Besides, do yourself a favour: Just walk into any Computer Science major class, check the number of woman/men there and let us all know how much they go above those 20% and go check the numbers in the previous years while the board of Yahoo (and any major company in that area) was being built. Ok?

I don't know who is in the wrong or right at Yahoo (or if it's even that simple), but you really aren't thinking about this very carefully.

There is a obvious rational path for them to get there. I'm not saying it is correct, mind you, or that the implementation would be a good idea. I'm saying that the statements to the effect of "well obviously it was discrimination" are sloppy.

The obvious path looks something like this. 1) Become convinced that there has been a systematic bias in hiring and promotion that has promoted one class of workers in your organization (in this case, men) above their merit. 2) Become convinced that this has led to an inversion of talent in your reporting structure (in this case, many women in your company working for less capable male bosses). 3) Believe that the structural problem represented threatens the effectiveness of the company.

If you truly believe these three things to be true (and they are all at least plausible, there is nothing terribly far fetched in the above), then you act as in any other structural problem - you re-organize. If you believe you have an untapped layer of female talent in your organization due to systemic discrimination, it absolutely would be in your company and shareholders best interest to try and redress that.

Again, I'm not saying it is correct. I'm just saying that "well obviously it has to be discrimination" is either lazy or inept - and that it surprises me to see it echoed here so many times.

To your last paragraph, CS majors are a very poor proxy for competent management, and using previous make up is only useful if you assume that was not exhibiting the same bias you are trying to correct.

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#202

Post by frankc »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #157
imaginenore wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if they were not deliberate about it Which is statistically close to impossible.

...but when men are in the 80%, that's a statistic you can believe?

If it went from 20% men to 80% men in a short period of time...no.

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#203

Post by scott_karana »

doublescoop wrote: post #192
IndianAstronaut wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know someone at HP who suddenly had to go in to work. This put him in a situation where he had to pay thousands for day care and he threatened to leave until they finally let him work from home again.

So, an employee was doubling as a full time care giver for his children while remote working? That sounds like exactly the kind of practice that gives remote work policies a bad name in the first place. If I found out one of my employees was taking care of his kids while working at home, you better believe it would result in a conversation and a possible revocation of his use of the remote work policy.

You're ignoring their effectiveness.

Maybe they work better without coworker interruptions and in a familiar space, which offsets any negatives of caregiving.

And even still, who cares?! Do you actually have a good handle on how many of your employees just read HN or Reddit for half a day? Unaccounted for smoke breaks? Having to make personal calls while on the clock?

Humans aren't automatons.

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#204

Post by leaveyou »

omgtehlion wrote: post #111
leaveyou wrote: post #53

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.

Wait, you were still using yahoo? It's 2016, dude

but dude, what about that extremely common corner case, like if you gave your 2001 yahoo email to a very large number of people and institutions ? what do you do then dude ? no, seriously, how do you migrate and email (because I'm about to try it)?

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#205

Post by JoeAltmaier »

sp332 wrote: post #184
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, perhaps not the 'exact same'. How do we know this time it wasn't done fairly?

Is picking senior management about fairness?

"Fair" in the sense of "gender-blind"

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#206

Post by existencebox »

geofft wrote: post #139
dgudkov wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>hiring friend/referral/former colleague, especially en mass is much bigger issue that's rarely talked about because it's not necessarily illegal. And it's not necessarily wrong.

It's not necessarily wrong, and quite justifiable, at the individual level. It creates significant inequities when everyone does it at scale. Leaving aside all questions of legality and punishment (the only reason you care about punishment is if something goes wrong), what is the right way to solve this? How, in an ideal world, do we fix the significant inequity that many people today happen to have homogeneous netwo…

Let me ask an incendiary question (I feel not great that I even have to qualify this, but I'm admittedly nervous of talking about these sorts of issues in certain lights given social context nowadays); but you're clearly thinking about this comprehensively enough that I'm curious to hear your thoughts, I don't necessarily have an answer either.

Is some amount of inequality at scale _necessarily_ a bad thing, if it arises from a fundamental systemic property of the socio/business/economy context we've bought into? I'll make a rather absurd parallel; look at money itself. To have more money enables gaining more with less effort, (citing the common "boots" theory of economics, basic laws of investing returns, etc) Therefore, enabling anyone to have more money than someone else creates significantly compounding inequality. Should we ensure that can't happen? I acknowlege it's a bit of a strawman but I would hope it also conveys a point both of implicit systemic cycles and tradeoffs of redressing them. As you concede, there's a tangible benefit towards hiring known entities and cohesive teams, even though at scale it tends to favor the incumbent majority.

Rather than ask if the inequality is in itself bad, I'd try to look at the funnel and see if there are any truly improper barriers to the out-group, and focus on rectifying those. Like in CS I'm always wary of KPI based iteration since it can cause "overfitting"/ignoring transitive effects, and "raw diversity numbers" to me is a very opaque KPI.

(Whether the systems that lead to these patterns is good is a totally separate discussion and one so huge I don't think I have the background to speak on it well, but I'm trying to question pragmatic steps to be taken that don't involve a burn-it-down-and-rebuild or throwing the baby out with the bathwater)

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#207

Post by JoeAltmaier »

CaptSpify wrote: post #195
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No claim. Just astonished at the assumption implicit in this thread, that it can't be correct that 80% of competent managers at Yahoo! are female.

I don't think people are upset that 80% are female, I think it's that 80% changed to female. That stat is too high to be coincidental

Again, maybe because Marissa chose a metric that changed the status quo. And fairly applied it. No need to think its a coincidence. It could be exactly the right people got put in position because they were fairly measured and promoted. It's not a coincidence AT ALL that it happened when a new boss got in town. That could be when the biases got removed.

But this forum will not give up on the idea that women in management has to be a mistake and can't occur except by some cheating.

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#208

Post by JoeAltmaier »

frankc wrote: post #202
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...but when men are in the 80%, that's a statistic you can believe?

If it went from 20% men to 80% men in a short period of time...no.

But should she be ousted and a new (male) boss installed and it goes back to 80% men, then all would be well and normal? No laptop outrage then.

I'm not suggesting that the change was a statistical fluke. I'm suggesting that maybe in this case some women at Yahoo! were better management candidates than some of the men. In a ratio that's large but not unprecedented. Look at the rations found in other companies - so often its 80% men but that's not seen as unusual or wrong.

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#209

Post by shepardrtc »

twblalock wrote: post #68
iamleppert wrote: post #52

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…

If your manager does not like you, he does not need a formal review process to screw you over. In fact, without a formal review process, it would be even easier to screw you over, because there won't be any paper trail at all.

You're absolutely right. In fact, the formal review process - even though it seems terrible - is actually giving you plenty of time to find another job.

Re: Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers

#210

Post by jbmorgado »

ska wrote: post #201
jbmorgado wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why, did they remove almost all the woman there in 1 year to change it for men? Talk about apples and oranges. Besides, do yourself a favour: Just walk into any Computer Science major class, check the number of woman/men there and let us all know how much they go above those 20% and go check the numbers in the previous years while the board of Yahoo (and any major company in that area) was being built. Ok?

I don't know who is in the wrong or right at Yahoo (or if it's even that simple), but you really aren't thinking about this very carefully. There is a obvious rational path for them to get there. I'm not saying it is correct, mind you, or that the implementation would be a good idea. I'm saying that the statements to the effect of "well obviously it was discrimination" are sloppy. The obvious path looks something lik…

> To your last paragraph, CS majors are a very poor proxy for competent management, and using previous make up is only useful if you assume that was not exhibiting the same bias you are trying to correct.

And what bias is that? That 20% of woman in Yahoo, actually reflects very well the percentage of woman with expertise in the area, because that's also the percentage of woman that actually took the effort to learn about the subject trough college and in faculty?

Please let me know exactly where is the bias in expecting that an IT company reflects the same ratios between sexes that you actually see in college for an IT area.

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