Google to Yahoo!: Tech grapples with white male discontent

Bloomberg

Google isn’t the only Silicon Valley employer being accused of hostility to white men.
Yahoo! Inc. and Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. were already fighting discrimination lawsuits brought by white men before Google engineer James Damore ignited a firestorm—and got himself fired—with an internal memo criticising the company’s diversity efforts and claiming women are biologically less suited than men to be engineers.
The Yahoo! case began last year when two men sued, claiming they’d been unfairly fired after managers allegedly manipulated performance evaluations to favour women. They claim Marissa Mayer approved the review process and was involved in their terminations, and last month a judge ordered the former chief executive be deposed. TCS, meanwhile, is fighting three men who claim the Mumbai-based firm discriminates against non-Indians at its US offices.
A growing backlash against diversity advocates has gained momentum with the election of Donald Trump and his embrace of right-wing media figures including Steve Bannon, who ran Breitbart News until joining Trump’s presidential campaign.
Trump has ordered a review of affirmative action policies in higher education, proposed banning transgender people
in the military and advocated curbing immigration of
non-English speakers to the
delight of conservatives who say they’ve been muzzled
by liberals.
While gender discrimination complaints aren’t uncommon in the tech industry, they are usually made by women, who are outnumbered by nearly 3 to 1.
Ellen Pao put Silicon Valley’s “Bro Culture” front and centre in 2015 during a trial pitting her against the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. She claimed there was a sexually charged atmosphere where men preyed on their female coworkers and that she’d been blocked from promotion and fired for her gender. She lost, but the trial rallied other women to speak out. That year Microsoft Corp. and Twitter Inc. were both sued on behalf of female engineers claiming men are favoured for advancement. This year, Travis Kalanick was ousted as Uber Technologies Inc. CEO after allegations of rampant sexual harassment.
Damore’s memo circulated widely internally, then became public over the weekend as some right-wing websites lionized him for speaking out. Over 10 pages, he complained that efforts at Google to boost diversity were themselves a form of discrimination that are “unfair, divisive, and bad for business.” He filed a complaint with a federal labour board last Monday and says Google smeared his reputation by firing him.
In the Yahoo! case, Scott Ard, an editor for the company’s auto, shopping and small business portals until January 2015, alleged that Mayer encouraged supervisors to evaluate employees using “subjective biases and personal opinions, to the detriment of Yahoo’s male employees.” Women eventually accounted for more than 80 percent of the top management positions in the media division, according to the suit.
Yahoo! denies wrongdoing and argued against Mayer’s deposition, saying she had no special knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the firings of Ard and Gregory Anderson, another online news editor who said he was fired, along with staffers, in 2014.
A Yahoo! spokeswoman defended the performance review process in February 2016
after Anderson filed his complaint, saying “fairness is a guiding principle.”