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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

#301

Post by int_19h »

st3v3r wrote: post #282
yuhong wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suggest a compromise to only include certain kinds of jobs like manual labor under employment anti-discrimination laws, where workers are actually commodities that are measureable and interchangeable.

So tell me, what exact dollar amount do you need to make where discrimination against you is ok?

I think it's more of a question of how much leverage do you have.

If everyone is discriminating against you, like Jim Crow South, it doesn't really matter how much you make, because you can't go and find a different job easily.

But if discrimination is limited, and the job market for this particular job and in this particular area favors employees, then it's a self-correcting problem - people will just walk. And if an effective boycott is possible and will take care of it, why go through the slower and more resource constrained court system?

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

#302

Post by int_19h »

hueving wrote: post #74

This is ultimately the result of things like 'implicit biases' training that tell you to accept that you are unfairly subconsciously advantaging majorities and that you should explicitly disadvantage them to make up for your biases. Disgusting.

>> that you should explicitly disadvantage them to make up for your biases.

I don't know where you've had your implicit bias training, but mine was nothing of a kind.

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

#303

Post by int_19h »

matt4077 wrote: post #14
argonaut wrote: post #7

I'm extra-suspicious of this lawsuit because of the opportunistic timing. He was fired in January 2015, more than 1.5 years ago. And yet the lawsuit is only filed now during Verizon's process of closing its acquisition of Yahoo. Whether or not he has a case, his motives now have an antagonistic taint because he no doubt timed this to maximize the PR damage and his chances of getting a quick settlement.

If the article is a good preview of the case, it does seem to be bullshit... The mechanism by which this discrimination supposedly happen was the stack ranking feedback system. Now I believe stack ranking is stupid and somewhat cruel. But I don't see how it allows more discrimination than other grading systems. The lawsuit also doesn't claim intent and it'd be quite a stretch to assign liability to the CEO for hard-t…

If the lawsuit is to be believed, it's a stack ranking system with some unusual twists - most notably, the part where higher ranking managers can arbitrarily change ranking scores of anyone under them, bypassing their direct managers. He gives a specific example where scores of several people were decreased from above with no explanation, and seemingly no clear basis other than gender.

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

#304

Post by int_19h »

geofft wrote: post #140
leaveyou wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't deny that the situation must be analyzed carefully but going from "less than 20 percent female" to "more than 80 percent female" in less than 2 years leaves little room for doubt. Also this adds up to the undisclosed security breach and the fact that Yahoo secretly scanned emails for US Intel.. Not a very defensible behavior.

Going from less than 20 percent female to more than 80 percent female is being exactly as discriminatory , though. You should have been offended all along, right?

Not necessarily.

If your candidates are 80% men and 20% women, and your hires are 80% men and 20% women, your process isn't discriminatory. DIscrimination is still happening, but it's somewhere before you in the pipeline. Some would argue that you have an ethical obligation to "reverse discriminate" to mitigate it, but that's much more ambiguous than plain discrimination being bad.

On the other hand, if your company goes from 80%/20% to 20%/80% in 2 years, it's the difference that is very suspicious. Either you're deliberately discriminating (possibly "reverse discriminating"), or the distribution of candidates changed that much, or you have removed glaring discrimination that existed before.

Either way, you need more numbers to judge.

Oh, also - this all makes sense if we're talking about a sufficiently large sample. If it went from 8 men and 2 women to 8 women and 2 men, I wouldn't be comfortable making any conclusions - on a sample that small, I would expect individual differences to dominate.

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

#305

Post by int_19h »

geofft wrote: post #142
hueving wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, the 80 percent female just matched the gender ratio of the broader industry. /s

1. Just as much as the 20 percent male did. This is middle management, and the ratio is roughly 50%. 2. How is the gender ratio of the broader industry relevant here? If everyone discriminates, is it okay to discriminate? Maybe these women were just better at their jobs than the male candidates. Anecdotally, the average woman I've worked with is far more competent than the average man I've worked with. Are you willin…

> This is middle management, and the ratio is roughly 50%.

Can you cite any sources for said ratio, for middle management in IT?

I'm genuinely curious - I don't know the numbers, but I also find it hard to believe, just on the basis of the distribution that I've seen in various places where I worked.

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

#306

Post by geofft »

int_19h wrote: post #304
geofft wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going from less than 20 percent female to more than 80 percent female is being exactly as discriminatory , though. You should have been offended all along, right?

Not necessarily. If your candidates are 80% men and 20% women, and your hires are 80% men and 20% women, your process isn't discriminatory. DIscrimination is still happening, but it's somewhere before you in the pipeline. Some would argue that you have an ethical obligation to "reverse discriminate" to mitigate it, but that's much more ambiguous than plain discrimination being bad. On the other hand, if your company…

> If your candidates are 80% men and 20% women, and your hires are 80% men and 20% women, your process isn't discriminatory. DIscrimination is still happening, but it's somewhere before you in the pipeline. Some would argue that you have an ethical obligation to "reverse discriminate" to mitigate it, but that's much more ambiguous than plain discrimination being bad.

I'm not (right now) interested in ethical obligations to discriminate or reverse discriminate or anything. I'm interested in hiring the best candidate for the job.

If your candidates are 800 men and 200 women, and you need to hire the 100 best candidates from that pool, you have very little to believe that the 100 best candidates are roughly 80 men and 20 women. You have even less reason to believe that if you have a suspicion that there's discrimination happening in the pipeline.

So if your goal is hiring the best candidate for the job, you shouldn't look at the ratios of demographics coming out of a known-biased pipeline at all. If you end up hiring 80 men and 20 women, you should have your own reason why four times as many men than women were in the set of best qualified people.

If your goal is some vague social-justice politically-correct nonsense like ending reverse discrimination, then you care about putting the blame on the pipeline and slavishly following the numbers it gives you.

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

#307

Post by int_19h »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #214
kelukelugames wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Joe, no need to feel disturbed. HNers are good people. I used to think otherwise, but dang corrected me. The percent of misogynists or racists is far less than 100%. I would say at least 80% of the comments in this thread are not sexist in anyway. Which to be honest is pretty good.

I'd be more comforted if even the not-overtly-sexist comments didn't have an assumption of the truth of the title: its a problem when significant numbers of women are promoted into management.

Most comments do not imply that. What they imply is that the magnitude and the speed of the change is suspicious (not necessarily a problem, but likely to be indicative of one). It would be just as suspicious if they went 80% to 20% in the other direction at the same rate.

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

#308

Post by iron0012 »

jimmywanger wrote: post #289
iron0012 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true in my experience, and I doubt it's true in yours. While "guys" is sometimes employed to refer to a mixed gender group of people, it would be very weird for "guy" or "dude" to be used to refer to a woman. Argue in good faith, please. And try not to police PC here. You're not bringing anything to the discussion.

You bring up your experience, basically call me a liar about my experiences and accuse me of not adding anything to the discussion. Interesting. I grew up in California and what I said is a fact, as confirmed by other people. What are you bringing to the discussion exactly besides baseless accusations?

I've lived in California as well, and I maintain that you are full of shit.

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

#309

Post by School-Cotton »

protomyth wrote: post #244
hibikir wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really about the review process, but about making one of the biggest mistakes you can make: After you know your manager doesn't like you, you didn't do everything in your power to either switch teams or change companies. Nothing good will come out of working for a manager that doesn't like you. You'll get worse reviews than you deserve and worse raises. You'll get less exposure to other parts of the compan…

> That's not really about the review process, but about making one of the biggest mistakes you can make: After you know your manager doesn't like you, you didn't do everything in your power to either switch teams or change companies. The biggest career advice you can take: it never gets better, there is no good fight, and you should flee to save yourself. I expect the parent post [edit: iamleppert] was blameless, but…

> The biggest career advice you can take: it never gets better, there is no good fight, and you should flee to save yourself.

This is demonstrably false since a lot of people like their jobs (that includes me and, anecdotally, most of the people I work with)

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

#310

Post by School-Cotton »

NhanH wrote: post #107
hibikir wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really about the review process, but about making one of the biggest mistakes you can make: After you know your manager doesn't like you, you didn't do everything in your power to either switch teams or change companies. Nothing good will come out of working for a manager that doesn't like you. You'll get worse reviews than you deserve and worse raises. You'll get less exposure to other parts of the compan…

> So the real rule when looking for new jobs is to avoid places where they hire first and do allocations later, as your picture of what the company is at interview time might be completely different than what you'll find on day one. Oh hey that's actually a whole lot of big corps ... most prominently Google, isn't it?

Facebook is like this as well, but I very strongly disagree that it's a negative.
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