Lawsuit Accuses Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer of Discrimination Against Men

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer again finds herself at the heart of a lawsuit by a former male employee alleging that she presided over the unfair ousting of men in the office.

Scott Ard, Yahoo's former editorial director and current editor-in-chief of the Silicon Valley Business Journal, filed a lawsuit against Mayer earlier this week in federal court in San Jose, California.

In the suit, as reported by The Mercury News, Ard alleges Mayer encouraged 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."

Ard also accuses Kathy Savitt, Yahoo's former chief marketing officer, and Megan Liberman, the current editor-in-chief of Yahoo News, of discriminating against men. As evidence, the lawsuit alleges women accounted for less than 20 percent of the "top managers … including the chief editors of the verticals and magazines" reporting to Savitt when she started with the company.

"Within a year and a half those top managers were more than 80 percent female," the lawsuit says, alleging that Savitt "intentionally hired and promoted women because of their gender, while terminating, demoting or laying off male employees because of their gender."

The suit says Ard was fired in 2015 for allegedly unsatisfactory performance, but that his performance reviews and stock options had previously indicated he'd been doing a "fully satisfactory" job in his roughly three years with the company.

And according to the lawsuit as cited by The Mercury News, Liberman told Ard he had been terminated because "she had not received a requested breakdown" of his duties, though Ard claims he had already provided that information. His suit claims "Liberman's excuse … was a pretext" for his elimination.

A Yahoo spokeswoman tells U.S. News in an email that Ard's "lawsuit has no merit."

"With the unwavering support of our CEO we are focused on hiring employees with broad and varied backgrounds, and perspectives," the spokeswoman says. "As we have stated in the past, the quarterly performance review process is not only fair but has improved our overall performance."

Gregory Anderson, another former editorial employee at Yahoo, sued the company back in February with similar accusations. His lawsuit claims he'd received permission to attend a fellowship during his tenure at Yahoo but was fired while he was away. When he asked to see documentation of the performance review metrics that reportedly resulted in his termination, he allegedly was denied.

The review process "was opaque and the employees did not know who was making the final decisions, what numbers were being assigned by whom along the way or why those numbers were being changed," the lawsuit says, suggesting the review process "permitted employment decisions, including terminations, to be made on the basis of personal biases and stereotyping."

Mayer took over at Yahoo in 2012 and presided over a series of wide-reaching and controversial layoffs. Her company is currently in the midst of finalizing a $4.8 billion deal with Verizon, though the latter company is reportedly seeking a significant discount after the revelation that Yahoo was the victim of a data hack.

A group of congressional lawmakers recently sent a letter to Mayer asking for a more specific timeline of events surrounding the data breach, saying the compromise initially took place in 2014 but that it went unreported until recently.

"This breach is the latest in a series of data breaches that have impacted the privacy of millions of American consumers in recent years, but it is by far the largest," the letter said. "Consumers put their trust in companies when they share personal and sensitive information with them, and they expect all possible steps be taken to protect that information."

A recent report from the Financial Times alleged Mayer had known since at least July that a breach had taken place, but did not immediately disclose that information to the public or to Verizon.

Yahoo also has been thrust at the center of the privacy vs. surveillance debate this week, after a Reuters report said the company had cooperated with U.S. intelligence officials by building a software program to search customer emails.