Women sue Musk’s Twitter alleging discriminatory layoffs

apnews.com

9 pointstareqak10 comments

> The lawsuit filed late Wednesday for former employees Carolina Bernal Strifling and Willow Wren Turkal on behalf of similarly-situated female workers makes the claim that 57% of female employees were laid off on Nov. 4, compared to 47% of male employees, citing a spreadsheet.

The latter employee mentioned here is actually male, so I wonder how this claim will play out in court, considering that he's not really in the sex category that his lawsuit claims has been discriminated against.

This should get thrown out of court. It won't be anytime soon, but it should be.

Why?

For a layoff where half the company is being laid off, if it is done fairly some subgroup of the population will be slightly more impacted. This isn't nearly a large enough gap to suggest malice or other hostile intent.

The only two ways to ensure that "no protected group sees a disproportionate impact" are to make layoffs illegal (probably what some people would like, but impossible), or to require companies to do a lot of demographically-based bias in the name of avoiding it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com