Technology companies in the US have been submerged recently with claims from female employees detailing gender discrimination. Any opinion that technology is a male arena is being debunked and challenged. Over the past year, Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft have all faced lawsuits from disgruntled former female employees.
However, there has been something of a recent turn up for the books, The Guardian reports. In a lawsuit filed on the 1st of February in a US district court, Yahoo was accused of ‘actual and intentional gender-based discrimination’ against male employees by Gregory Anderson, a former Yahoo employee who worked as an editorial director for the website for four years, until he was sacked in November 2014.
As of last year, Yahoo’s diversity figures were somewhat similar to other Silicon Valley tech companies. Yahoo’s work force was found to be 62% male with a whopping 76 percent of leadership roles at the company being filled by men, so hardly a level playing field.
However, Anderson in his lawsuit does not paint a picture of a male dominated atmosphere. Instead he accuses female management figures at Yahoo of ‘intentionally hiring and promoting women because of their gender, while terminating, demoting or laying off male employees because of their gender”.
Kathy Savitt, Yahoo’s former chief marketing officer, and Megan Liberman, the editor in chief of Yahoo News are singled out by Anderson. According to the claim, the percentage of female managers in Yahoo’s media division increased from 20 percent to more than 80 percent during Savitt’s tenure.
Yahoo has so far not opted to confirm the figures, but many would view them as welcome in an industry that has so far struggled with an under-representation of women within the technology sector.
Rebecca joined the HRreview editorial team in January 2016. After graduating from the University of Sheffield Hallam in 2013 with a BA in English Literature, Rebecca has spent five years working in print and online journalism in Manchester and London. In the past she has been part of the editorial teams at Sleeper and Dezeen and has founded her own arts collective.
