Silicon Valley’s gender wars are always simmering just below the surface waiting for a reason to boil over.
Marissa Mayer, the embattled CEO of Yahoo, has provided the latest reason.
She has been at the center of a cascade of bad news in recent weeks that raise serious questions about her judgment. The 500 million Yahoo emails hacked in 2014 that we only learned about now. The reported scanning of users’ emails for the feds. The meltdown of Yahoo as a company. All not good.
But what really touched off an avalanche of anger about Mayer was the second reverse discrimination lawsuit filed this month by a former Yahoo editor claiming the company discriminated against men.
The suit accuses Mayer of using the company’s performance review system “to the detriment of Yahoo’s male employees.”
While many tech firms have elevated the issue of bias against women and minorities in hiring and promotion, there is an equal and opposite reaction happening in offices everywhere. Some see corrective action as unfairness and bias against them.
I don’t know anything about the merits of the cases. But bias has long been running against women in Silicon Valley, who make up only roughly about 30 percent of the tech industry workers compared to 70 percent men.
If one side-effect of working to correct that bias is the filing of reverse discrimination suits, maybe the companies are actually doing something right.
“People who have been in the majority perceive outcomes as unfair that aren’t unfair,” said Joelle Emerson, founder and CEO of Paradigm, a consultancy firm that works with tech companies to improve the diversity of their work force diversity. “This is what it feels like when correcting the bias.”
Marissa Mayer vitriol shouldn’t come as a surprise. Bashing female CEOs is what Silicon Valley does. Carly Fiorina was reviled when she headed Hewlett Packard. Meg Whitman has taken her knocks at HP. When she held the top job at Yahoo, Carol Bartz was criticized for her abrasive manner, something taken for granted among male leaders. And let’s not even get started on Ellen Pao, Reddit’s interim CEO.
To some, Mayer herself was a diversity hire, under-qualified when she took the helm of Yahoo in 2012 and recklessly extravagant with her $10 million hire of Katie Couric and a Christmas party that cost millions.
What critics forget is that Mayer, formerly a Google executive, hasn’t exactly been an avatar of equal rights, once saying that she wasn’t a feminist and another time quipping, “I’m not a girl at Google, I’m a geek at Google.” And she curtailed the firm’s telecommuting policy, just one more reason cited for why she isn’t well-liked.
But then came the lawsuits accusing her of reverse discrimination against men. The most recent was brought by Scott Ard, formerly head of editorial programming for Yahoo’s home page and now editor-in-chief of the Silicon Valley Business Journal. His claim that the female leaders Mayer installed arbitrarily dismissed men and promoted women apparently rang true to many.
“Just another example of the slow march of feminist narcissists intent on monopolizing leadership of media through affirmative action, female quota hiring, and in this case using unjust means to achieve their ends,” wrote Bloke on the Mercury News site.
But commenter Lisa Presley said the allegations of the suit are “every day for women….how many times has a woman interviewed for a job and a lesser qualified man has gotten it…..shut up you cry baby men.”
Emerson says it’s natural for employees to wonder what’s happening if more women than usual are hired. “That outcome may appear to be discrimination,” she said. “But if the company says we are still hiring people for the job but expanding the schools we hire from, they might not like it, they will understand how decisions are made.”
Or as Deborah Rhode, a law professor at Stanford put it, “All I can think is no good deed goes unpunished.”
Sure, Mayer deserves blame for questionable business decisions and what appears to be general disarray at the top.
By all means, give her a kick. She’s going to walk away with millions in severance, that is if Verizon’s $4.8 billion bid to buy key Yahoo assets goes through.
But even after Mayer leaves the tech industry’s main stage, Silicon Valley’s gender wars will rage on. And men will have to find a way to stop crying.
