I was a manager of a software development and innovation team at a well-known nonprofit research institute. I hired a fairly junior developer who happened to be female. As it turns out, she took the job just as a stepping stone to another, arguably more prestigious team in my institute. She basically punted on her responsibilities, ignored specific requests and tasks, lied constantly about her progress, demanded that we pay for her art education out of our project budget, and generally did little but get coffee and chat with people on the team she wanted to jump to. Meanwhile I frequently had to clean up her messes and fix what little code she managed to write, at significant personal cost.
After doing all the things a supportive manager should - praising her publicly, coming up with plans to improve performance, being quite encouraging and supportive in our 1-on-1s, and giving her specific warnings about her behavior and performance - it finally came time to fire her. She went literally crying to my boss, who then told me we couldn’t fire her, because we might get sued for sexism, or something. Despite the fact that I treated her with utmost respect and superhuman patience. But since my workplace was raging with #MeToo consciousness (as evidenced on our Slack channels daily, and elsewhere), she got away with it and in fact got exactly what she wanted all along.
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” - Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time