Hacker News Reader

Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

"It also alleges that women were treated better by managers in the media group. While men were immediately terminated after receiving low employee scores, women were allowed to appeal their ratings, the suit says."

View on HN

Speaking from experience, statements like this are often cases where the actual story was more benign than the perception, and the statement here is the perception, not the actual story.

If this is true, then there's a huge problem, but I'm willing to believe (pending more information) that the policy isn't this blatantly sexist, and that the truth is somewhat more nuanced.

It's also a lawyer trying to make a prima facie complaint to avoid summary dismissal of a lawsuit. As long as there's a good-faith belief that this could be true, including such an allegation in the complaint will expand the plaintiff's pre-trial discovery breadth. That costs Yahoo more money to defend, increases the likelihood of uncovering a smoking gun and puts the plaintiff in a better settlement negotiation posture.

This is how lawsuits works. Employee has one valid complaint. Lawyer tacks on a dozen more complaints and hope the company settles.

Yeah, it's a pity that the system we put in place to make victims whole first asks us to say the worst about everybody involved, victim included. Not that I have a better idea, but I think there's a cruel irony to it.

It's the same in criminal law as well. You allegedly violated a law? Well here are four more that say the same thing in a slightly different way. Oh, you were within 100' of a school? Possibly longer jail time? It was a construction zone, too? Here's another three offenses that open you up to civil litigation as well.

Reminds me of the Microsoft quote someone here brought up yesterday, "I've said it before and I'll say it again, we're too damn disorganized to be as evil as you think we are."

Given Yahoo's track record it is much easier to believe this whole mess was due to ineptitude by management/hr, yet sexual discrimination is a much 'sexier' headline so they went with that.. and oh look all the "super smart" people on hacker news still "circle jerk" over it. It's almost like were not a superior community and are quite comparable to the rest of the internet..

When it comes to evil, Microsoft was as organized as Sheldon Cooper's desk drawers when I worked there. Disclaimer: that was well over a decade ago. Most product discussions (and therefore decisions), for example, were in terms of killing competition, not in terms of building a better product, and war rhetoric in general was quite prevalent.

I kind of understand it, it's easier to motivate people to work hard if they believe they're at war (as Joseph Goebbels once astutely pointed out), but my god, what a shitty way to build products.

> "I've said it before and I'll say it again, we're too damn disorganized to be as evil as you think we are."

That's actually hilarious. Our defense is... our ineptitude!

Its hard to rectify gender bias without somebody crying foul.

i'd say there are 2 schools of thought here - one is zero-sum game and another is that you can't make somebody more free or equal by increasing oppression or inequality toward somebody else.

Rectifying inequality will always reduce the advantages of the privileged -- those advantages are the inequality. Whether they choose to pretend that they are now being oppressed or acknowledge that the status quo was unacceptable is up to them.

That's true in the sense that if A has 50 resource points and B has 40, A has an advantage that is lost when, in rectifying inequality, we redistribute the resource points to 45-45. What is being suggested here, however, is that perhaps it is possible to find 10 extra resource points in the budget and give them to B so that we finish with 50-50.

is that perhaps it is possible to find 10 extra resource points in the budget and give them to B so that we finish with 50-50.

The point is that A will very often perceive this as a negative outcome.

Continuing the analogy, if it was originally 60-40 men-women, and the allegation is correct that only women are allowed to appeal their results, that's more like tipping the balance 40-60, which is a negative outcome for men. Allowing both genders to appeal their results would be a more balanced 50-50.

if it was originally 60-40 men-women, and the allegation is correct that only women are allowed to appeal their results, that's more like tipping the balance 40-60

Is your assertion that every other aspect of these women's employment is equal to or greater than the corresponding aspect for the men?

You don't fix inequality over there by adding "balancing" inequality over here.

Was that a 'yes', or a 'no'?

Name one single instance where systemic inequality was fixed at the root. I'll wait.

Gentiles didn't have be be discriminated against in order for Jewish students to start doing very well in Harvard a few generations ago. The distributions flipped pretty much as soon as entrenched barriers such as quotas were removed. The same was true for East Asian students in elite universities decades later.

Oppression of the Japanese after WW2.

Now name an instance where it was fixed by giving them much better treatment than everyone else.

The interned Japanese received 1.6 BILLION in reparations after WW2. Try again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...

Those are the interned. I'm talking about how Japanese were treated afterwards. We don't give hiring preference to them and don't accuse companies without enough Japanese employees of racism. Try again.

Everyone defined their own metrics. Good talk everybody!

Affirmative action in the 90s. Millions of women and people of color were allowed to enter and advance in the workforce. The CEOs for McDonald and IBM crawled to the top after benefiting from minority leadership programs.

Yes, that's why female and black employment/compensation isn't a hot button issue at all any more.

Slavery, gay marriage.

Is this a joke?

"Hey let's end slavery."

"No, I rather secede."

Civil war

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolitionism_in_the_United_Kin...

> The point is that A will very often perceive this as a negative outcome.

Has this been systematically tested in some way, or is it simply assumed?

(I think I've seen this happen, so I'm not arguing it doesn't occur, but I am asking what the basis is for assuming it's a primary driver of systemic discrimination. The words "very often" seem like they cross a threshold to generality.)

Loss of privilege is often perceived as oppression.

On the other hand, the creator of Dilbert just shrugged it off and started a new job each time his employer said they couldn't promote another white male.

equality requires not a loss of privilege, but an equal distribution of privilege. This means hiring/firing should give an equal consideration to both genders.

A 50/50 m/f ratio is not a statistical "proof of equality".

Yeah, Rosa Parks shoulda shrugged it off and waited for another bus!

Seriously though, 'often' is just a weasel word if you don't specify the context. This might qualify as a mechanism for dismissing valid complaints...

Are you comparing discrimination against black people in the 50s to what may have happened to a man? A lot of civil rights activists wanted affirmative action too.

Often is most of the time. People perceive relative changes as terrible. That's why they arrested Parks instead of agreeing with her.

Why? It's an analogy, the relevant parts match; There's no rule that says discrimination has to reach a certain level before it should be resisted . Stop derailing my point with irrelevancies.

"A lot of civil rights activist" - which ones and why? Maybe their reasoning is sensitive to their particular interest.

I understand what 'often' means, I don't agree with it as a generality. Even 'People perceive relative changes as terrible' isn't always true.

That may have been what was happening in the OP?

Trying to do that creates strong non-linearities and the end result is unlikely to create a healthy equilibrium.

Err, why not let everyone appeal their rating?

(I understand, percentage wise, due to bias or whatever, it's likely a higher percent of things would be overturned for women, but it's not like the error rate for non-women was 0 anyway, so why not just make a process that nobody is going to complain about?)

In my reading, the description of the process running in this manner is an allegation, not an established fact. So it's not really clear that Yahoo has anything to answer for on this point.

Sure, i understand. I meant my parent is complaining that clearly the women can appeal because of gender bias issues affecting them more heavily than men, as if that magically would make it okay.

Instead, the thing that seems "okay" on that point would be "let the men appeal too" (IE my parent is wrong no matter what!)

What would be the result of that? You appeal and find, oh management really did make a mistake and is incompetent of it's primary purpose of evaluating employee performance correctly. AND, management did in fact discriminate and now has proven it for any and all future and current lawsuits. There is literally no reason for management to allow ratings appeals.

"What would be the result of that? "

(Let's ignore the obvious point - not everyone is malicious, some companies really do want to try to make sure people get correct ratings and get rid of discrimination, and aren't worried about the cost of lawsuits. These companies exist, i've worked at them)

Again, i think you missed the point (I guess i'll be more explicit when it's a touchy subject like this). If you read the allegation, women were allowed to appeal, men were not.

Someone tried to say that this was okay, because gender bias affects women more.

But it's not okay. It makes no sense. Either you believe some people are getting terminated wrongly, in which case both women and men should be able to appeal, or you don't, in which case nobody should get to appeal :)

Natural Justice is one - in the UK not having a proper appeal procedure and applying it is normally an automatic "unfair dismissal"

And if your a big company and take the piss in court you get the book thrown at you by the Triibuneral see Imarsat a few years ago.

That's like saying there is no reason for a single party government to investigate claims of corruption.

Management is not a monolith.

You don't do it by running a discriminatory discipline regime.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com