Gender Issues are Shaking the Tech Industry Treehouse

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The war against gender bias in Tech switches theaters from finance to product, and is revealing the provincial folkways of a supposedly fast-forward industry

Essentially, the allegation is that there's a feedback loop leaving women at a disadvantage at Twitter: The people making decisions about who should be promoted are men, and the people they're choosing to promote are more of the same. 

The idea that people might be biased towards people like them is hardly a radical: Some academics have even argued that favoritism towards people within an individual's own group is a more likely cause of most modern discrimination than active malice towards people with different backgrounds. Looking for things like a "culture fit" may seem innocuous to the people in charge of hiring or promotion — but ultimately can lead to companies hiring a bunch of people with the same life experiences as current employees at the expense of other candidates with different and potentially important perspectives.

And the lack of diversity in tech means such "ingroup favoritism" could have particularly pernicious outcomes for the industry where, despite a myth of meritocracy, who you know can play a big part in getting your foot in the door.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2015/03/23/the-network-effect-at-the-center-of-the-twitter-gender-discrimination-lawsuit/

So what does Twitter get so wrong when it comes to promoting gender equality? Here’s Huang’s list as presented in the lawsuit text obtained by Mashable. 

“Twitter’s policies and practices have thus had the effect of denying equal job opportunities to qualified women. Such policies and practices include, without limitation:

a. Reliance upon subjective, gender-based and/or arbitrary criteria utilized by a nearly all male managerial workforce in making promotion decisions;

b. Failure to follow a uniform job posting procedure to guarantee that all employees have notice of openings;

c. Effectively discouraging women from seeking or applying for senior level and leadership positions;

d. Failing and refusing to consider women for promotion on the same basis as men are considered;

e. Failing and refusing to promote women on the same basis as men are promoted and compensated;

f. Failing to provide women with accurate and timely notice of promotional opportunities;

g. Providing women employees interested in promotion shifting, inconsistent and inaccurate statements about the requirements and qualifications necessary for promotion;

h. Establishing and maintaining arbitrary and subjective requirements for promotions which have the effect of excluding qualified women and which have not been shown to have any significant relationship to job performance or to be necessary to the safe and efficient conduct of Twitter’s business;

i. Failing and refusing to take adequate steps to eliminate the effects of its past discriminatory practices; and,

j. Retaliating against women employees who complain of unequal treatment.”

Huang invited other current and former female Twitter employees to join the suit. According to Huang’s numbers, only 30 percent of Twitter’s overall global workers are women but that number drops to 10 percent when only technical jobs are considered. Twitter’s leadership team is 79 percent male. It was not until the company’s IPO in December of 2013 that Twitter named the only woman, Marjorie Scardino, to its board of directors.

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2015/03/twitter-gender-bias-10-things-lawsuit-promotions.html?page=all

If Huang’s case gains class-action status, as her legal team hopes, it could attract more female plaintiffs — and more attention to the plight of women in tech.

The Pao case “is more culturally significant than legally significant,” said Reuel Schiller, a professor at UC Hastings School of Law and an expert on labor and employment law. But the Twitter suit “could be a much bigger deal ... and a potentially broad claim.”

If the case becomes certified as a class-action suit — which could take a year — “you could get programmatic change or injunctive relief, and that could get a company to change,” said Felicia Medina, San Francisco managing partner at Sanford Heisler Kimpel, who has worked on several large gender discrimination cases.

Not only does it involve a brand-name company that’s become embedded in American culture, but it also takes dead aim at the tech world’s vulnerable underbelly: The workforce at many of the industry’s best-known companies, including Twitter, is largely white and male. A mere 10 percent of Twitter’s technical employees are women — low even by the tech world’s underwhelming standards, according to data released last summer.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Twitter-sexism-suit-could-have-greater-impact-6153974.php