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2.19.16

Former Worker Claims Yahoo Discriminates Males  

Gregory Anderson, former employee of Yahoo Inc., is suing and accusing Yahoo of sex discrimination, shortly after the company allegedly kept and hired more women workers than men. Gregory Anderson was in charge of Yahoo’s autos, homes, shopping, small business, and travel sites before his termination in 2014. Anderson is saying that his former employers, especially Chief Marketing Officer Kathy Savitt, favored female workers. Anderson’s lawyer wrote that Savittpublicly 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.”  

While there is nothing wrong with wanting more women working in an industry, hiring or terminating employees based solely on whether they are male or female is gender discrimination. When Kathy Savitt began at Yahoo, top managers in the industry were 20% female, and today, just three years later, they are 80% female. Marissa Mayer, chief executive at Yahoo, instituted the 1 to 5 point ranking system by which employees are ranked, which plays a large part in determining which employees are terminated.  

Mr. Anderson’s case entails him reportedly receiving high ratings before taking a leave of absence in the summer of 2014 to study at the University of Michigan on a Knight-Wallace Fellowship, which was approved by his supervisors. However, during the Fellowship he received a call informing him that he was actually in the bottom 5% of the employee ratings, and would be terminated as a result. The lawsuit was filed in a federal court in Washington D.C., and it claims that Mr. Anderson was fired not for reasons related to job performance, but instead due to gender discrimination.

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