Marissa Mayer Deliberately Tried To Get Rid Of Male Yahoo Workers, Lawsuit Claims

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and her key lieutenants allegedly implemented a process whereby male managers were illegally purged from the company to pave the way for females to replace them.

That is the contention of an employment discrimination and civil rights lawsuit filed against the company by former Yahoo manager Scott Ard, who is now the editor-in-chief of the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Ard went to work for Yahoo in September, 2011, and was abruptly terminated in January, 2015, despite a series of positive performance reviews. Ard directed editorial content for Yahoo’s home page until his job duties were allegedly transferred to a recently hired female in June, 2014.

Scott Ard claims the reason for his termination from the internet portal was based on unsatisfactory performance, which was a pretext (or a smokescreen in non-legal terms) for gender discrimination.

Ard filed his 24-page lawsuit in San Jose, California, federal court this past week, with the Mercury News summarizing the allegations as follows.

“Mayer encouraged and fostered the use of (an employee performance-rating system) to accommodate management’s subjective biases and personal opinions, to the detriment of Yahoo’s male employees.

“In addition to Mayer, two other female executives — Kathy Savitt, former chief marketing officer, and Megan Liberman, editor-in-chief of Yahoo News, identified in the lawsuit as Yahoo’s vice president of news at the time — are accused in the lawsuit of discriminating on the basis of gender.”

Lawsuit: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led illegal purge of male workers https://t.co/sZpE4IZA56

— Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) October 8, 2016

The former employee’s legal complaint claims that of the senior editors that Savitt hired or promoted, 87 percent of them were allegedly female, and within a year-and-a-half, top managers reporting to Savitt allegedly grew from 20 percent female to 80-percent-plus female.

“Ard’s suit also takes aim at the performance-review process he said Mayer imposed. The process allowed high-level managers to arbitrarily change scores of employees they had no contact with, and it “permitted and encouraged discrimination based on gender or any other personal bias held by management,” the Mercury News added.

Yahoo has denied the allegations, insisting that the performance review process is fair, and that the lawsuit lacks merit.

“The lawsuit is the second this year accusing Yahoo of discrimination against men, and targets one of the highest-profile Silicon Valley female executives, Mayer, who is in the middle of divesting Yahoo’s core assets after failing to turn the company around,” the New York Post noted.

It also emerged this week that Yahoo allegedly may have have run custom-made software that secretly crawled through millions of emails searching for specific snippets of information security agencies like NSA or FBI were looking for, the Inquisitr previously reported.

Last month, Yahoo acknowledged that a massive data breach could have compromised the accounts and personal information of about 200 million users. Stolen data in the hack may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, and passwords.

“Yahoo was recently acquired by Verizon, which is now reportedly requesting a $1 billion discount on price due to a teensy bit of hacking. Mayer’s future at the company remains unclear, but she stands to walk out with a sweet $55 million if Verizon cuts her loose,” Gizmodo asserted.

“A recent report from the Financial Times alleged Mayer had known since at least July that a breach had taken place, but did not immediately disclose that information to the public or to Verizon,” U.S. News & World Report indicated.

In general, Marissa Mayer’s stewardship of Yahoo has not lived up to expectations, Breitbart News claimed.

“Mayer, a former Google engineer, became a prominent symbol of female empowerment in the tech industry when she was hired as Yahoo’s CEO in 2012, especially since she was pregnant when hired. Initially, she was credited with rescuing the company from a long downward spiral under several previous chief executives. However, the company’s woes continued, and Mayer has failed to find a new business model for Yahoo, which is now largely focused on spinning off its core assets.”

“Marissa Mayer became CEO on a wave of optimism and then engaged in a sleight of hand to terminate large numbers of employees without announcing a single layoff,” and allegedly in non-compliance with state and federal layoff laws, Scott Ard’s five-cause-of-action legal complaint against Yahoo claims, in part. The civil lawsuit seeks money damages in an unspecified amount for gender-based discrimination and other alleged violations as well as additional forms of legal relief.

[Featured Image by Frank Franklin II/AP Images]