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Comment by dec0dedab0de | Hacker News Reader

Most of this sounds horrifying, and if its true I hope they throw the book at them.

However this one line seems like it would be hard to prove:

They(women) were also assigned to lower-level positions and passed over for promotions, despite doing more work than their male peers in some cases

I know many people who are really good at filling out their TPS reports, and never break the rules. They don't ever get promoted, because they do so much in their current role, and since they never break the rules, they never get to be highlighted for "showing initiative." Though if the rest of it proves to be true, it would not look good.

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TFA excludes it, but from page 12 of the filing [0] there's an example of someone with measurably worse performance getting promoted ahead of a female colleague:

"... In another example, a female employee who worked at Blizzard Entertainment was assigned to a lower level, denied equal pay, and passed over for a promotion despite multiple factors that suggested she earned it: (1) highly rated performance reviews; (2) she generated significantly more revenue in her marketing campaigns than her male counterpart; and (3) she ran almost twice as many campaigns as her male counterpart."

0 - https://aboutblaw.com/YJw

I'm saying that If she's making twice as much money where she is, why would you want her to do a different job?

Though combined with all the other allegations it doesn't look like it's just standard corporate unfairness/politicking.

If you've got a dev that codes absolutely brilliant bug-free code at a lightning pace - you give them an honorary title bump and a pay bump appropriate to their performance while keeping them in about the same role. Organizations with role based salary caps that are more generous to management than individual contributors are acting in a self-destructive manner.

What were the responsibilities of the promoted position?

There are plenty of other factors at play in viewing a candidate for promotion. Leadership ability, experience, overall operation knowledge, seniority, and etc. Bringing in revenue is only a fragment of the considerations.

It looks damning on the surface, but she could tank a portion of the review that is critical to being promoted and still rank highly.

This is a situation that it's best to reserve your conviction until it plays out in court.

As an aside, I've seen poor results from (2) and (3) a few times, regardless of gender.

Junior marketers who run a litany of extremely expensive campaigns, generate a lot of revenue at the cost of negative ROI, and act shocked when losing the company's money is frowned upon.

> However this one line seems like it would be hard to prove

Its a civil case. If it goes to trial, the standard of proof is “preponderance of the evidence” (basically, on the evidence presented, is the allegation more likely true than false), not the criminal standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt”.

Systematic gender discrimination in promotions (absent a smoking gun like a document in which that is outright stated, or testimony of multiple ex-managers to having been involved in such a policy) may be challenging to demonstrate even in that context, but it is very far from impractical.

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