Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers
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In my case, I had a manager who simply didn't like me because I'm gay and used the performance review process, and eventually put me on an action plan and forced me to quit.
Most of the big tech companies will put you on something called a PIP, which is a "Performance Improvement Plan". It basically means they are preparing to fire you, but they give you an option: quit now, and you can have some severance, or you could try and stay and complete the PIP, but still run the risk of being fired for any reason, and in that case, you get no severance. It's exactly what happened to me, and I decided it wasn't worth the stress to try and stay and fight it so I just quit.
It was the most demoralizing experience ever, and really showed me that these processes are in place so managers can just get rid of people they don't want or like.
My experience has been that the biggest factor is your direct manager. If your manager hates you, then you have a serious problem, because no matter what kind of process (or lack of process) your company has, they can get you fired. On the other hand, a good manager can help you do your best despite any existing "cookie-cutter" process.
Your manager can say "based on feedback everyone says you suck" and you can't really do a whole lot to look into it. You don't know where the feedback is coming from, or if it's even valid.
At a smaller company a manager seems more responsible to look at performance democratically. So if they have a personal vendetta and they fired someone for it, it's much easier for other employees and other managers to see what's going on and call it out (so they might not act on it to begin with).
Of course that's not universal, sometimes at a small company you might have one person with consolidated power so it doesn't really matter (and can be much worse). And of course, at a smaller company peer pressure can keep issues under wraps because you're worried about everyone knowing that you're the one bringing it up.
So yeah, a performance review process needs to exist at larger companies because it makes sense logistically... but criticism of that process doesn't mean it should be thrown out entirely, it just welcomes the discussion about how it can be improved. There are middle grounds between strict performance reviews and small-company democracy.
First, nobody has an incentive to provide negative feedback except for serious cases (i.e. you cannot work with this person) or for political reasons. It's a prisoners dilemma with indefinite iterations, so each player's incentive is to provide positive feedback.
Second, in my experience, it's only reviewed by one person rather than by a management team, which opens it up to an array of biases on the manager's part. If a manager thinks that someone is a great team-player, and a reviewer says that that person is a petty tyrant, they're likely to doubt the reviewer's motives rather than updating their beliefs.
Peers supply the feedback, but one manager has the time/resources to review it... so basically they can interpret it however they decide.
This has the same result as the formal review system, but with a lot less overhead. More importantly, if you're denied promotion out of spite, you know that - they can't just say "well, it's not my fault, it's just how the process worked out".
Yes, good managers can definitely help cut through the BS even with a process in place, it takes time and effort for them - time and effort that could be used on something more valuable. And sometimes, no amount of effort is sufficient to buck the process.
From my experience, by the way, a formal competitive review system (buckets etc) makes it more important to have a good manager, because you absolutely need your manager to play the game well against other managers to yield good results for you, no matter how hard you work. If your manager is indifferent, or can't play the game well, they'll take away whatever was left on the table after the rest, and that's what you'll be stuck with.
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 company: Every second you spend in that situation is a second wasted.
That said, I am absolutely not putting the blame on you here. A manager that doesn't like one of their reports should either get over it or do their best to ship them to a place where they'll be better appreciated. The tech industry is full of terrible managers though, and you are probably not going to make yours better.
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.
This is an issue with big banks like Capital One. The management culture is absolutely awful there and they hold a tremendous amount of power and of course abuse that power as well as abuse the workers.
I've also not seen anybody leave the company on bad terms. Of course I'm sure that happens, and I'm sure there are bad managers here as everywhere. I'm sorry that you had such a negative experience.
I used to work for Capital One Europe, the UK side of the business that currently only does credit cards, until last year. I'd seen a mixture of some people leaving on good terms and some on bad terms, with no obvious correlation to performance. Personally, I left on good terms for a new role elsewhere.
I'd suggest when you're talking about a company of sufficient size; there are always going to be a mixture of those leaving on good terms and those not.
I get yelled at on a weekly basis. Belittling is comon too, such as being told "you're not that smart and this isn't rocket science". Managers are non technical managing a technical project and micromanagement is the norm.
Oh hey that's actually a whole lot of big corps ... most prominently Google, isn't it?
"Who did you have lunch with? Oh, some dude."
Try not to language police here. You're not bringing anything to the discussion.
Last week I got up from the table to throw the rest of my burrito away and offered to take my wife's as well by saying "Dude, are you going to finish that guy?" I understand it isn't "correct", and the English are within their rights weep for their language if they like, but it is not weird at all in coastal California.
"Do I plug this guy or that guy into the switch?"
This was in North Texas.
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?
The conversation was about the colloquial usage of the word dude and guy. Nothing was said about lady.
and I'm using 'lady' asexually. Is this triggering you?
Certain words mean certain things in certain contexts. If you want to start using "lady" as an asexual term, go for it. Be prepared for stares and weird looks when people don't know what you're talking about because it's not generally used that way, unlike 'dude and guy'.
What's your point exactly?
Project much?
> all I've done is address you by the wrong gender.
How do you know it's the wrong gender? Why are you making assumptions about my gender, without knowing if I identify as a female?
My original point was the the words "dude" and "guy" have lost all gender connotations in California at least. Try to stay on point.
All the mainstream European languages I've seen (Germanic and Romance) don't seem to have this capability at all, and it's a big deficiency. Formal English doesn't have it either, but colloquially we've evolved it, using "they" (which of course is bad because it's supposed to be used for referring to people in the plural sense, not singular).
So don't complain about a language having structural problems if yours isn't any better.
I would prefer mentalese over Vangelis' direct to be honest ;-)
"guys" became gender neutral sometime in the 70's, Rita Moreno: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_iGaQglnKg
If you are willing to make the fanatic choice; your the employee they want. They might be missing out on a lot of talent in the industry. But they do weed the candidates down to fanatics.
By finishing the process? I had other offers, and they waited the <one week it took to finish team matching with Google.
When would that take a long time? It was a quick chat with a few managers and then I picked.
Just felt like going through the cogs of a machine that didn't give a shit, which really didn't give me incentive to give a shit in return. Big companies suck.
But as I said above, don't paint all big companies with the same brush. Google's interviews are not at all like the interviews I've done with a bunch of other big companies. In many big companies, the different groups work entirely differently anyway; when I interviewed at Freescale, it wasn't any different than interviewing at some small company really, and the small workgroup I ended up working in was a great team to work with, and again didn't deal that much with the rest of the company anyway. It was a great experience except for upper management screwing it all up after a couple of years.
Of course, there's other disadvantages to working for big companies. Lots of dead weight (see: that recruiter I worked with), lots of rules, a lack of trust, lots of bureaucracy... I'd do it if I have to, but the small company vibe works way better for me.
Working there had its ups and downs. I will say, that company could actually produce stuff, unlike some places I've seen. It was also really, really nice to have a cubicle, but they were "compressing" those when I left. I have no idea if they've moved to the stupid open-office plan or not since then, but I kinda doubt it actually. I really miss having a cubicle... I used to think they sucked, but after years of other office arrangements, I now long for a cubicle again (though a walled office would of course be much better, just like it'd be nice to live in a $10M mansion and have a private jet).
Anyway, the interview process at Intel back then was grueling and ridiculous, with a bunch of managers coming in and grilling me with questions on all kinds of stuff, a lot which I had no idea about (like device physics). But a couple years ago I interviewed with Google. That was probably the worst interview experience I've ever had.
Lastly, I've interviewed at and worked with some other large companies. Their interviews were nothing like Google's.
Google's interviews are not like other companies', and are not representative of large companies at all. Google's interviews are unique to Google, and have been roundly criticized by many.
If they suck due to non-malicious ineptitude, it's usually pretty bearable, and you can self manage your way around them.. if they suck as a human being.. wooo buddy, time to bounce.
A good manager is both a buffer and a lubricant. They pave the runway, and get out of the way.. and then make you feel good about what you do, while understating their own contribution.. ( and hopefully get their fuzzies from the business stakeholders, who see the productivity and progress gains. )
Shout outs to all the good managers out there! :D
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 that won't save you in most companies. I dream of a company that actually gives a crap about the people writing their code, but HR / Management will always back the a??hole to preserve the company. Maybe instead of hiring widget managers they would find people who have "shipped" creative endeavors (TV Shows, plays, etc.). Don't know if it would work, but it cannot be worse.
This is demonstrably false since a lot of people like their jobs (that includes me and, anecdotally, most of the people I work with)
"If it's a bad environment -- it never gets better, there is no good fight, and you should flee to save yourself."
It's very possible to find places that are good to work at. It's highly unlikely for a shitty environment to get significantly better.
> It's very possible to find places that are good to work at. It's highly unlikely for a shitty environment to get significantly better.
Yep.
PIPs aren't really good documentation of bad performance; in fact, a badly-written PIP can actually backfire on the company because the wording is usually full of holes a good lawyer can drive a truck through. Basically instead of the company having proof you were a poor performer, you now have proof the company is lying to get you out the door.
A PIP is a lawsuit deterrent, not an actual legal defense.
If you work for someone else, I have bad news for you ...
† The reason may not be immediately evident of course. But when you unwind the bureaucratic logic, ultimately there's almost always a reason behind these phenomena.
Deming's 3rd deadly disease: Annual rating of performance. “It is purely a lottery”
More of a popularity contest than a lottery.
So everyone was either a 3 (meeting expectations) or 4 (exceeding expectations in some areas).
I did manage to persuade my line manager (the CIO) to give me a 5 on something but he then felt the need to mark me down somewhere else so I remained a 4 overall.
Utterly pointless exercise.
Then they insisted I move to keep my job. Since the move meant going to a better job market I went along with it and then quit after a decent amount of time.
Off-topic mini rant: This is something that pissed me off about college too. Grading on a curve just serves to mask flaws. Either the professor is shit, the course is shit, the test is shit or the students are shit. Shifting the goal posts so that the top score of 54 / 100 is now an A is just dishonest.
Why demoralization? It ain't you, it's them. There will be more people you don't want to work for than that you do want to work for anyway. I thin you'll find that the good people are bright lights in an ocean of darkness.
Also and seriously - there are still people in tech who allow homophobia to affect their behavior to that extent?
Yeesh.
However, there are usually two sides to a story. I hope you are also considering the possibility that it had to do with your work, your work ethic, your ability to work with others, your ability to take direction, etc.
Speaking as someone on the other side, I hate PIPs too as well as the institutional performance review processes. I wish I could get rid of low performers easily but it is pain.
New team thought it was absolutely ridiculous I was on it, as did many members of the original team. I finished the pip just fine. I work at Large Transportation Company. Same shit over here.
Once I was working with a manager that loved the fact I'm gay, I do great work, stress levels are down (or at least, the stress incurred is the 'fun' kind of stress), etc.
I do agree the review process is ridiculous - I've never been in a company where they had them prior to this. We were told to choose 2-5 coworkers that were really involved in our day to days within the review period (6 months), and after doing so my manager went in and added the rest of the team (including coworkers I barely saw that I had one or two interactions with over the course of months), including other coworkers that had made very brash comments about my boyfriend/age or about gays in general.
Manager used that shitty feedback from three out of the nine total employees that reviewed me (that otherwise gave pretty glowing reviews) to initiate the pip.
There was a whole bunch of other BS with the situation - e.g. a manager and another coworker joking about satanic rituals against us in our team HipChat room - that I really don't feel like going into detail about that just added insult to injury.
What's worse, there has been no investigation into the matter much past asking the offending manager to "talk about things". Oh well.
It was a very small startup. Oddly enough, that boss and I get along really well outside of work, and I'd still gladly go out for drinks with him or something, but I will never work for him again.
> that boss and I get along really well outside of work
hm.
Also, he gets irrationally angry when anyone calls out the terrible job done by his friend who he put in an architect position. One co-worker of mine at that company... he raised the issue and ended up being railroaded into quitting a couple of months later, and then I'd heard my boss slandering him behind his back a few times.
It's been almost two years since I quit, and I still have painful flashbacks to the way he would yell at people.
But he is fun to hang out with when there's no power differential involved and when he's wasted.
The "bad as a human except when he's drunk" is pretty interesting, considering it usually works the other way around. Keep that shit at arm's length.
As time progressed, I noticed that engineers who hung out with him often and discussed interesting topics such as good school districts, real estate, investments, sales at frys electronics etc. were rewarded not just with better work but also promotions, some of them undeservedly. When I finally decided to quit there was not even a "thank you" from him or his minions for my hard work. There were several disgruntled employees in my org who never kissed his bottom and they were all treated with similar nonchalance.
A couple of decades in U.S. corporate life led me to conclude that such performance reviews are nothing more than paper/records generation to back up (legally, risk-reduction, etc.) whatever decision Management decides to make.
They have little or nothing to do with actually performance management and improvement. Well, if you are "favored" by your management, maybe some productive training/coaching will be reflected in them. If you're lucking and have good immediate management. But this is stuff that would have happened, regardless.
Performance reviews are an HR process. And any and all HR processes are about preserving the status quo. They have nothing to do with your personal well-being.
Ok so has that worked out well for Yahoo? Clearly it's been enough time by now to do an evaluation of Yahoo practices looking back and say something like: "Yeah thanks to these great management practices we have reconquered market share / are the new exciting place where everyone wants to work / or we lead this revolutionary research"? It ended up being owned by a phone company in the end.
So if Yahoo is a failing company, what they did there, will be associated with failure. It seems they effectively moved the cause of promoting women in technology fields backwards. When someone will say "we should find a way to promote women more" ... "Oh, right, Yahoo was heavily into that, yeah that was ugly, the lawsuit and all...".
It is a bit like the crazy person advocating for your favorite language or framework, it's nice to have a fan, but because they are crazy, they are pushing everyone away with their behavior.
> as well as for low performers to be transitioned out.”
"Transitioned out" ... there is an almost a positive ring to it. "We've reached out to them, found their pain points and helped them transition out to a new stage". Is that how everyone talks now? Or is it just me who finds it grating.
When a girl fails in math class, it's "women are bad at math".
When a guy fails, it's "John is really stupid".
When I see a woman running an organization that believes in inequality as a prerequisite (I'm right wing and I can say that without qualification), here I'll use the Tories in the UK, then if I see a Margaret Thatcher or a Theresa May, then I know they have the right stuff.
I'm afraid it's a question we will never be able to answer. I wonder about it myself. Disclaimer: i've known the Seymel..Bartz yahoo and I've always thought that there was an enormous execution problem amongst employees (myself included). In addition to this, in my field (engineering), I've always kinda felt the culture was rather mediocre.
Call me pessimistic, I've never believed it's a company that could be turned over, I remember jokingly letting my friends know back in 2005, when i got hired, that I had just signed up for a sinking boat. Yahoo would not die but would simply not be a landmark internet company but somehow get to a secondary rank. Apologies for the digression.
So to get back to the yank and rank strategy that yahoo followed: what's best, a mass layoff or giving people a chance to be in or out? Seems like at yahoo the rank and yank strategy was not implemented state of the art as each team had to get a certain % of employees yanked and ranked. Side effects are very well known, lower performers of high achieving teams get the axe while highest performers of low achieving teams get promotions. People start aiming at the middle to prevent promotion, and more :)
Now I still wonder what's the least unfair way to clearly cut a workforce that needs to be cut.
Even if they were not deliberate about it, they must have talked about how this might be perceived by employees.
As bad as this issue is, I think hiring friend/referral/former colleague, especially en mass is much bigger issue that's rarely talked about because it's not necessarily illegal.
However, I cannot overemphasize how demoralizing it is, especially when they aren't proven to be any better.
Caucasians are still a huge portion of the Silicon Valley work force. It's women, hispanics, and african americans who make up some tiny percentage...
Palantir was recently accused of discrimination against Asians because they hire them at a much lower rate.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/09/26/regulators-accuse-pal...
And it's not necessarily wrong.
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 networks, and hiring from your network means that you perpetuate any homogeneity, while also saying it's totally okay and encouraged to found a startup with a close friend instead of with someone who passes an exam?
And how do we get from here to there?
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)
...spouses, children, nephews, the guy who gave you a jump-start in the Walmart parking lot...
Which is statistically close to impossible.
That seems unlikely.
Q.E.D.
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.
Sounds similar to the wage gap argument here: if it exists, where are all the companies hiring cheaper workers capable of doing the same work, exploiting the supposed market inefficiency?
So no, I don't feel sorry for her one bit.
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.
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.
Don't need a handle on it if you block access to them.
But my work found that blocking Reddit/Facebook actually made less work get done: people couldn't spend 5-10 minutes to unwind and then plug back in and work. That policy lasted a single week.
If we generalize that to "what is wrong with frequent distractions" - open plan offices would fall into that category. For an answer, I would direct you to read any one of the many well-articulated anti-Open-plan rants on HN. Toddler care has all the downsides of an open plan office without the (possible) upside of increased team-productivity.
If I found out one of my employees was using their office as a social lounge while working at my company, you better believe it would result in a conversation and possible revocation of their on-site privileges, forcing them to work in solitude at home instead so I could see real results.
> In 2013, for example, Yahoo's new CEO Marissa Mayer banned employees from working at home. She made this decision after checking the server logs for the virtual private network that Yahoo employees use to remotely log in to company servers. Mayer was upset because the employees working from home didn't sign in enough throughout the day. She was, in some sense, punishing her employees for nor spending more time checking e-mail (one of the primary reasons to log in to the servers). "If you're not visibly busy," she signaled, "I'll assume you're not productive."
"Batching" email to specific times in the day is a pretty well-known productivity win, especially for people whose job it is to engage in deep work.
People who routinely worked outside of the office, or just wanted to be able to read their e-mail at home without the VPN client randomly panicing their system, had devised various workarounds to get things done.
The corporate VPN is distinct from production, so you could still do actual work without using it too.
Are you suggesting that people should have worked directly on production servers instead of using the VPN to work in a development environment?
Someone whose job pertains to operations does the bulk of their daily work on actual production hosts, for instance. Some tools (like the bug tracker) also didn't require use of the VPN.
And I got news for her - you can't visibly tell if I am busy or not short of standing behind me all day.
Still, you get the feeling she was sort of the sucker at that particular poker game.
Like a boss I had that thought programming was just typing and didn't understand why I:
1) Wrote a lot on paper and whiteboard;
2) Sat back in thought a lot;
3) Spoke with my colleagues.
I became "more productive" in his eyes by hiding in the testing lab to do my thinking. I was actually testing, too, but I didn't watch the test cases closely so I'd be writing/reading/thinking for a few minutes after each one ran.
This is something that always bothers me when I'm forced to pair program. I constantly feel pressured to put code on the screen instead of sitting back and thinking about how to tackle a problem. When I am tasked and allowed to do something on my own I often spend more time thinking ahead about the problem then actually implementing the solution, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this.
Programming is as much an art as it is a science, you can bang a keyboard all day but without putting thought into it (which typically requires pause or maybe a change of scenery even) it can often result in a worse product.
Were there any other companies that followed yahoo's lead?
...except for developers who were already largely working between remote teams anyway and caused some fellow employees with family and health responsibilities but were still good developers to have trouble and eventually leave the company. Cutting out existing options and freedoms to employees does not in any way help the culture of a company. I don't work there any more but every developer was very upset that I talked to at the time.
Any company I work for in the future I want at least the ability to work remote. I personally enjoy being in and around coworkers, but there were a few times when I wanted to work remote for periods of time to help with family. Being in an office can help _certain types_ of work - but it doesn't help all types of work, and development is one that can be remote.
Sadly, that used to be the most productive day of the week for me.
http://gizmodo.com/7-of-yahoos-biggest-fuck-ups-1745729341
http://gizmodo.com/how-yahoo-totally-blew-it-on-security-178...
http://gizmodo.com/heres-what-happened-to-all-of-marissa-may...
http://gizmodo.com/yahoo-secretly-scanned-users-emails-for-t...
http://gizmodo.com/state-sponsored-hackers-stole-personal-in...
http://gizmodo.com/sad-yahoo-sale-confirms-that-marissa-maye...
http://gizmodo.com/the-internet-is-targeting-yahoo-for-foste...
I almost felt sorry for them when I read articles like that it's the saddest deal in history as they could got more much money earlier. Now, I feel good that they are gone. fuff .. gone ..
I need to take care of my Flickr account now.
1. Tech giants are making room for themselves.
2. Their employees (male ones especially) are unhappy with deal, so they are attacking it.
3. Verizon is doing this to get discount.
4. CEO does not care about hiding lies anymore, she wants to be fired to get her money and may be she has lost control over her employees.
5. (highly improbable) They want users to delete their accounts due this kind of bad press.
Practices like these are going to ruin your business the same way being sexist, or racist will. Either you hire the best person for the job, or you’ll be beaten by companies that do.
Perhaps we need to examine the popular conception of what constitutes "sexism". This is right up there with the idea "more blacks = more diverse".
Do you have any examples of this? Many, if not most, large firms actively seek diversity.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/ratings-fumble-for-nfl-surprises...
But businesses have been making bad business decisions to justify nepotism, racism, sexism, any other kind of ism you can imagine since the history of business and I haven't ever heard of competition actually punishing any of them for it. Markets just aren't that efficient. The job that two different people for the same job might do just isn't big enough (or, really, isn't predictable enough) to matter. For every position (yes, even CEO) there are hundreds of thousands of people who would do a roughly indistinguishable (at the time of hiring) job.
It's just that culture and regulation change, so the people running businesses and the laws they have to follow change, so business practices improve.
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?
I don't actually particularly care about whether the boycott would work or not, in a sense of preventing the affected company from hiring more people. What I care about is remedying the material harm that is caused to people discriminated against.
If you are looking for a job, and they tell you that you needn't apply because of your race/gender/..., but there are thousands more equivalent jobs in your market that don't have such restrictions, there's no substantial harm to you - you can just pick any of those other jobs. If this particular business can hire enough bigots (or just people who don't care) to keep them running - so what? It still doesn't harm you. So it becomes a matter of principle, and from that perspective, I think freedom of speech and association is a more important principle than private non-discrimination, and so for the lack of measurable harm, the former should be preferred.
It's not just about jobs, too - same principle applies to services. if you have 100 bakers around you that aren't bigoted, and one who is, they cannot cause any meaningful amount of harm to anyone but themselves, by driving customers away.
Of course, if other businesses take note and start discriminating too, at some point, there are enough of them that your ability to get a job or service is hampered - you can't just go elsewhere (not easily, at least). Where and when that happens, discrimination should become illegal - but localized to the affected area and/or industry.
Think of it as anti-monopoly legislation. There are many shady practices that we don't punish businesses for until they are in a market dominant position (either by themselves, or through collusion with other businesses, which sometimes can be implicit). Same principle - shady or not, it shouldn't be prohibited unless it clearly harms someone.
So the kind of analysis that's necessary to determine whether legal anti-discrimination measures are needed or not is rather different from what anti-monopoly watchdogs usually do.
But yes, something like that in principle. A government institution that keeps track of various metrics and accepts individual reports, aggregates them, and determines which fields, industries, locations etc need anti-discrimination enforcement with teeth. Presumably with some sort of due process where this can be challenged etc, but ultimately, the decision should be made on the basis of whether there is discrimination or not, and not on whether it's intentional or not.
Based on the statistics that we have, it's definitely a problem, at least in the tech sector.
You have lost all credibility with that statement.
Further, your statement goes a step further and seeks to normalize and legitimize discrimination. You're saying that it's perfectly ok for this to happen, borderline encouraging it by removing any and all penalties for the action.
The onus is not on me to show harm. The onus is on you to demonstrate why your statement should be taken seriously, and why there is no harm. And simply being able to find another job before you starve to death is NOT evidence that there is no harm.
Discrimination is already legal in many contexts - private individuals can discriminate in most countries, private membershib clubs can discriminate in many places etc. Furthermore, even in areas where discrimination is illegal (e.g. public accommodation), there's generally a very limited list of traits on which it is illegal - race, religion, gender etc. Anything not on that list is not illegal to discriminate on - for example, it is perfectly legal to refuse to serve someone on the basis of their political view in US.
Do you believe that all forms of discrimination should be illegal, including private and personal? Do you realize the implications of that?
And yes, the onus is, in fact, on you to show harm. That's how legal system works in most cases. I don't see why it should work any differently here. Do you really want to people to be able to just claim discrimination on the basis of any random thing, and demand that the other party prove the lack of discrimination?
Whether or not reverse discrimination was taking place at Yahoo, it is worthwhile to try to reduce the implicit bias we practice in our own lives.
> In a narrower sense, it refers to the specific negative impacts Whites or males may experience because of affirmative action policies. The two meanings are often conflated, which leads to confusion and misinformation.
As companies try to fight historical biases, there will be some from the dominant group that suffer — those that might have been promoted under the old biased system won't be under a new less biased system. Advantages that the dominant group had will naturally be eroded. That's all well and good; an inevitable and desirable consequence of progress in the right direction.
However, if the Yahoo! figures from the article are right, this seems to be a case of active discrimination against male employees, which isn't the same thing at all.
Calling them both "reverse discrimination" elides the difference between those two possible meanings. So I prefer to think of what we're discussing here as active discrimination of no substantive difference to the usual historical discrimination. In Yahoo! some female managers were the dominant group — they had the power — and they used that power to discriminate against male employees to fill the ranks with other women. That's straight-up discrimination.
Of course, the whole thing might be nonsense, but we'll have to wait and see.
There isn't a thing as 'reverse discrimination'. Discrimination is discrimination, regardless of who is doing it.
There's a good Dr Seuss story about a guy that comes into town with a machine that stamps a star on your chest. A few people get it and think they're better than everyone else until everyone gets the star and the fashion becomes not having the star, and the story oscillates between star and no-star until everyone's out of money and the huckster with the star/no-star machine moves onto the next town.
Discrimination of all kinds is and has always been about mobilizing people against each other for the sake of accumulating power/money/resources.
Discrimination... discrimination never changes.
I wouldn't treat a Vox article as evidence that something is true.
> Worth reading this tweet storm...
LOL.
As others have pointed out already [0] IAT hasn't faired well in the replication crisis.
Of course this doesn't necessarily mean that 'implicit bias' doesn't exist in any form. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I'm just pointing out that saying "a real phenomenon backed up by good studies" in light of recent studies is kind of a stretch.
That said, this account doesn't seem to have any provable credentials associated with it and lacks even a first and last name...
>there is also little evidence that the IAT can meaningfully predict discrimination
This isn't correct. Any "training" program which would advocate for this would be highly unethical. At the end of the Vox article linked to by dankohn1, it gives steps to reduce implicit bias. These steps are all about awareness and mindfulness. Nowhere does it explicitly state to trade one form of discrimination for another.
Everything I've seen in this area focuses on ways to avoid bias (of whatever type) by process. How effective this is I don't know but it certainly isn't suggesting explicit disadvantage.
I don't know where you've had your implicit bias training, but mine was nothing of a kind.
So, it may be that the lawsuit was timed to put maximum pressure on Yahoo to settle, by creating risk of jeopardizing their sale.
But Yahoo has been on this trajectory since long before Mayer joined them. They are to internet services what Blackberry was to mobile devices. They were a transitional platform, just advanced enough from the old platforms (CompuServe, AOL) to succeed when they failed, but too like them to succeed once the industry transitioned to the new paradigm.
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-to-prove unintentional side effect.
Nobody denies that yahoo failed, but most people also believe that it's fate was sealed the day it refused to buy google, and that she did about as well as anybody would have.
...but also: she'd get a 60$ million bonus if fired, and considering that yahoo has already lost 90% of its former value and is being sold of, people probably stopped caring.
In 2000, when Yahoo signed the deal to use Google search results, they also made an investment as well. IIRC, they sold that when Google went public. Obviously, Yahoo made a ton on that.
there was also a time a few years later, when yahoo offered 3b for google: https://www.wired.com/2007/02/yahoo-3/
Then there is no seeming investment in the stuff Yahoo! is good at which is simply weird.
Speaking of Fiorina, there was a guy who was a CEO of a company taking tons of water too. He turned it around. And then he won the primary in which Fiorina also ran.
I am not 100% sure which primary you refer to, but McCain never turned any company around and Trump has just pivoted to being a floating brand. He's left a trail of wreckage in his wake but still gets to claim otherwise. I don't hold bankruptcy against anyone but you don't then get to construct an "I'm a winner" narrative from that. At least his communications style is that of a con man.
Now, in America, the phenomenon of Perfesser Harold Hill is really a thing - a "jasper" who does good without being good - but the narrative there doesn't work, either.
Perhaps this is exactly what someone is expecting from you now.
/s
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.
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.
Why not?
Statistically, at least, this should be true, provided that the candidates have been treated equally before they came to you. If they have disadvantaged in that treatment, it will skew the outcome even more against the discriminated minority - e.g. if women tend to get shittier education in certain field because their teachers don't believe them as capable as men, then of those 200 female candidates, the proportion of ones that are less qualified is likely to be lower.
If you somehow end up with the numbers that are reversed, it's not at all unreasonable to ask why - there ought to be a cause, and for a difference that big, it should be prominent. It may well be a reasonable cause - maybe you just got a bunch of really bright women in that batch, and that will be reflected in their career records etc. But it may also be sexism or other form of discrimination not related to performance.
We do investigations of discrimination against minorities based on statistics like these all the time. For example, one of the underpinnings of the ongoing push for police reform in US is the disproportionate number of black people when it comes to police interactions, arrests (esp. for often substance-less crimes like "resisting arrest" or "disorderly conduct"), and convictions. Generally speaking, this is not considered proof of discrimination by itself, but when there's corroborating evidence (e.g. you find out that some PD had a racist internal culture, based on the SMS the officers send to each other etc), it can certainly strengthen the case to the point where discrimination becomes the default assumption, and another explanation would require substantial proof.
In this lawsuit, the guy does cite several specific examples that, at face value, do indicate discriminatory approach, so dismissing such a large disparity and such a quick rate of change as "it just happens, wasn't on purpose" out of hand is not feasible - it requires evidence to rebut.
Not necessarily. Maybe men are just more likely to be interested in tech, spend time tinkering with computers as young boys, etc.
Also note that "spend time tinkering with computers as young boys" is exactly what I mean by discrimination earlier in the pipeline - if your parents and other adults expect you to not be interested in computers as a kid on account of your gender, and don't provide opportunities to explore that (i.e. when boys get a Lego robotics kit for their birthday, but girls get dollhouses), that's already discriminatory.
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 willing to deny fundamental but politically-incorrect gender differences in your social justice crusade?
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.
Taken from the article, do you really need more proof?
"Yahoo’s diversity reports indicate that the percentage of women in leadership positions at the company rose slightly to 24 percent in 2015 from 23 percent in 2014."
You can come up with all the legal mumbo jumbo you want and with your handsomely paid lawyers you can even win the lawsuit, but it's obvious they where guilty of sexual discrimination, you don't need a court ruling to understand that.
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?
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.
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.
1) Most people in a college IT program are not going to end up in management (or at least, not with much responsibility), so using that class as a whole is a poor proxy. Assuming the ratio persists in a subset is too strong to leave without support.
2) Using the previous ratios of something as a baseline is only meaningful if that isn't exactly the thing you are trying to look at changing.
Again, I suspect this is just lack of care in thinking about it.
Mayer is a CS graduate that became widely successful in a management position. I would think she values technical management.
Now you own your email address, just in case Google disappoint you in the future.
I've tried alternatives (Instagram, 500px) but keep coming back to Flickr because I just prefer it to the rest.
Over the last couple of months, I have started migrating my photos/contacts to other photo sharing networks in anticipation of the eventual straw that broke the camels back.
This is buried in the very last line of the article.
I wonder if Verizon isn't trying to shed her and her departure bonus.
Let's see, 20% Women in STEM x 2 x 2 (twice as good; and, multiply by two to make up for half as far) = ... 80%
Q.E.D.
This kind of discrimination could be excused if it brought a tangible value to the company, but this reshuffling did nothing to help this ailing company.
Meyer's actions were discriminatory at worst; at best, it was merely gross incompetence.
A lot of women are routinely overlooked in management promotions. Since its 80% (or usually much more) men in every other company in Silicon Valley, we'll have to call discrimination and incompetence at all of them?
The assumption that women can't possibly belong in management is galling. No mystery why Silicon Valley has the reputation it does.
You're putting a lot of words in other people's mouths in this thread, and I believe you are equating skepticism and discomfort from the lawsuit's allegations with willful ignorance or even sincere sexism.
If a CEO wishes to fire half the company and hire new people, sure. If the CEO wants to fire half the company (who happen to be men) and replace them with new people (who happen to be women), again, sure.
If a CEO implements a review system designed to illegitimize honest work by a cohort of people and have them demoted and/or fired to minimize severance costs while bringing on or promoting people of a different cohort, then we have a discrimination problem.
Honestly I am a little surprised at the accusations of sexism towards people that are expressing discomfort with what appears to be a primarily sexist act.
> ... and have them demoted and/or fired to minimize severance costs ...
Tangential to this was the violation of the California and federal WARN act. Yahoo reduced the workforce by 600 employees without declaring the corresponding reduction in force under WARN acts.
If a company has 100 (federal) or 75 (California) or more full time employees that have been employed for 6 of the past 12 months and lays off 50 or more employees during a 30 day period, the employer falls into the WARN act.
This also isn't something that's new at all - its been brewing for months. http://www.californialaborandemploymentlaw.net/2016/yahoo-ac... is from March 6th.
Maybe firing them all was the right move, but it was too late to repair the damage.