Twitter is the latest company to face sex discrimination lawsuit for following arbitrary promotion policies that unlawfully favor men.
Tina Huang, a former engineer of Twitter has filed a gender discrimination lawsuit alleging a lack of formal promotion procedure that has led to a ‘tap on the shoulder’ culture that unfairly advances men.
In the complaint, Tina Huang worked at Twitter between October 2009 and June 2014, has been passed over for promotion in 2013 without “adequate” explanation, despite years of service, excellent evaluations by peers and supervisors and an absence of criticism or disciplinary issues.
The company’s promotion system creates a glass ceiling for women that cannot be explained or justified by any reasonable business purpose, because Twitter has no meaningful promotion process for these jobs: no published promotion criteria, nor any internal hiring, advancement, or application processes for employees.
Frustration with the opaque promotion process led Huang to email Twitter CEO Dick Costolo in March last year detailing her concerns. According to court documents obtained by Mashable she says she was then immediately put on leave while the company conducted an investigation, and subsequently felt she had no choice but to resign after three months “without explanation as to the status of the investigation, or mention of any possible time frame for her return to work”.
She claims Twitter has recognized it has a “company-wide, pervasive problem of discrimination” – noting that it has conducted internal diversity studies, focusing on barriers to women advancement, and recently began providing “bias mitigation” training across the company.
Last summer Twitter’s own diversity report recorded an overall gender balance of employees that skews 70:30 male. For tech employees specifically the skew increases to 90:10. And when it comes to leadership roles Twitter reported just a fifth of such roles being held by women, with a 79:21 skew in favor of men.
TechCrunchhas contacted Twitter and got response from a Twitter spokesperson
Ms. Huang resigned voluntarily from Twitter, after our leadership tried to persuade her to stay. She was not fired. Twitter is deeply committed to a diverse and supportive workplace, and we believe the facts will show Ms. Huang was treated fairly.
Twitter is not the first Tech company to face sex discrimination lawsuit. Last week a lawsuit was filed against Facebook also by a former employee alleging sex discrimination and harassment and a year before Github also faced accusations of sexism from a former employee and female engineer.
Source: TechCrunch
