A federal lawsuit filed this week by Scott Ard, editor-in-chief of the Silicon Valley Business Journal, claims that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer led an illegal “purge” of male employees from the company. Two other female executives are also named as defendants in the suit.
“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,” the lawsuit claims, according to the East Bay Times. Ard is a former Yahoo employee.
The suit also singles out former chief marketing officer Kathy Savitt, according to SiliconValley.com:
“When Savitt began at Yahoo the top managers reporting to her … including the chief editors of the verticals and magazines were less than 20 percent female. Within a year and a half those top managers were more than 80 percent female,” the lawsuit said. “Savitt has publicly expressed support for increasing the number of women in media and has intentionally hired and promoted women because of their gender, while terminating, demoting or laying off male employees because of their gender.
“Of the approximately 16 senior-level editorial employees hired or promoted by Savitt … in approximately an 18-month period, 14 of them, or 87 percent, were female.” the lawsuit said.
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.
Breitbart tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos has been one of Mayer’s more vociferous critics, calling her “a symbol of Silicon Valley’s disastrous tokenism.”
Yahoo has not yet responded to the lawsuit, except to defend its policies and performance reviews as fair, the East Bay Times reports.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.