Yahoo slapped with lawsuit for gender discrimination against men

Marissa Mayer, chief executive of Yahoo, speaks at the Yahoo Mobile Developers Conference in San Francisco, Feb. 18, 2016. Marissa Mayer, chief executive of Yahoo, speaks at the Yahoo Mobile Developers Conference in San Francisco, Feb. 18, 2016. Photo: RAMIN RAHIMIAN, NYT Photo: RAMIN RAHIMIAN, NYT Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Yahoo slapped with lawsuit for gender discrimination against men 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

Gender issues are a hot topic in Silicon Valley, and with a new lawsuit filed against Yahoo, things are taking a surprising turn.

A former Yahoo employee is suing Yahoo, alleging that CEO Marissa Mayer and other execs implemented an employee review system that led to an illegal mass firing of employees targeting men.

Scott Ard led the editorial team at Yahoo for three and a half years and was fired from the company last year. He filed the suit this week in federal district court in San Jose, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

"Mayer encouraged and fostered the use of (an employee performance-rating system) to accommodate management's subjective biases and personal opinions, to the detriment of Yahoo's male employees," the suit said.

This isn't the first time Yahoo's review system has come under fire. Earlier this year, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on another lawsuit filed by a "former media executive who alleged that he was unfairly fired for not meeting performance goals because there was nothing wrong with his work." This suit also claimed the review system was detrimental to male employees.

In an effort to turn around a faltering company, Mayer introduced the quarterly performance review (QPR) system shortly after joining Yahoo in 2012, and both lawsuits claim it led to the termination of hundreds of employees. Managers were required to place their employees into one of the established categories: "greatly exceeds," "exceeds," "achieves," "occasionally misses," and "misses." Mangers were given a target percentage of employees to assign to each.

The system allowed Yahoo to reduce staff through terminations rather than lay offs.

Laying off an employee can be more cumbersome from a company because the action must be reported to the state and requires a 60-day waiting period, while a firing can happen immediately.

Ard's lawsuit also accuses Yahoo management of changing review scores for employees whose work they never observed and specifically identifies Kathy Savitt, former chief marketing officer, and Megan Liberman, editor-in-chief of Yahoo News, as discriminating against men.

The lawsuit states that Savitt favored female employees over men, intentionally hiring and promoting them while "terminating, demoting or laying off male employees."

When Savitt began at Yahoo the top managers reporting to her ... including the chief editors of the verticals and magazines, were less than 20 percent female. Within a year and a half those top managers were more than 80 percent female," the lawsuit stated.

According to the lawsuit, Liberman fired Ard in January 2015 on a phone call, telling him that his performance was unsatisfactory.

Yahoo spokesperson Carolyn Clark told the Mercury News she couldn't comment on Ard's pending litigation and defended the company's review process as being fair.