Ex Twitter engineer seeks to show women can climb only so high

Bloomberg

The way Tina Huang tells it, the path to her resignation from Twitter Inc. was a Kafkaesque experience. She said she was denied a promotion, led to believe her coding skills were inferior, asked to take a leave of absence, and scolded for taking that leave.
Two years ago, she sued, contending that the company systematically thwarts the advancement of female engineers. Since then, she’s been gathering data on gender and pay for her peers there and says she can prove Twitter stacks the deck. By January, she plans to ask a state judge for permission to represent 133 female engineers at Twitter, in what would be the first group case of its kind in Silicon Valley if certified.
Huang said in an interview the time is ripe to do something that’s never been done before: pry open entrenched, male-dominated barriers in the technology sector. One catalyst, she said, was a February blog post by former Uber Technologies Inc. engineer Susan Fowler, which detailed a predatory work environment, infighting, a “chaotic” organisation and blatant sexual harassment. That post helped lead to the founder and chief executive officer’s ouster.
“You not only saw real action happen at Uber but you also saw the amount of the conversation” that followed, Huang said. “Women were emboldened by it.”
Twitter has rejected Huang’s claims in court filings and in a statement—saying that she resigned voluntarily after being denied a second promotion and company leaders tried to persuade her to stay.
“Twitter is deeply committed to a diverse and supportive workplace, and we believe the facts will show Ms. Huang was treated fairly,” the company said.
Since the suit was filed, the dynamics have changed in Silicon Valley. In September, three women at Google sued the company in a class action, claiming it systemically pays male employees more than their female counterparts.
Add to that a groundswell of women speaking out in the past few months with complaints against tech and venture capital companies alleging sexual harassment, underscoring the rocky terrain women face culturally and professionally.
“Hearing the stories from numerous other women has helped me understand how my incident, though unique in its details, is part of a larger narrative,” Huang said. “It’s basically impossible for any individual to know with 100 percent certainty that her promotion was denied due to gender. The only way to understand the systemic bias is for all of us to share our experience so we can look at what’s happening on the whole.” Huang joined Twitter eight years ago as one of its first engineers. In 2013, she was one of a number of people considered for a promotion.
Engineers at Twitter are placed on a “technical ladder,” with an eight-rung hierarchy. When Huang joined the company, the ladder didn’t exist, but she was eventually slotted into the fourth rung. No woman had ever reached the fifth rung, yet it was a critical step because it’s where engineering jobs shift from coding and discrete projects to higher-level management.
Huang learned she didn’t get the promotion in February 2014 and promptly told the chief executive officer at the time, alerting him to her concerns that the process lacked transparency and that she believed she was denied a promotion due to her gender. But it was hearing from a colleague that her coding, an engineer’s fundamental tool of the trade, was deemed inadequate that felt personal.
“Even though I knew it was bogus, it was a huge emotional toll,” Huang said. “It took years for me to recover confidence in my engineering and technical skills.”
Before Twitter, Huang had worked at Apple Inc., where she helped develop the OS X operating system, and Google, where she worked on Google News. She left both companies on good terms, and as of January 2014, a few months before she left Twitter, was rated “exceptional” in a performance review. Huang’s lawsuit seeks to show the result of systemic discrimination rather than detailing treatment.