(Newswire.net — October 9, 2016) — The former Yahoo executive filed a lawsuit against the company’s CEO Marissa Mayer, claiming he is a victim of gender discrimination.
In his lawsuit, the former senior editor of Yahoo’s media section, Scott Ard, claims there has been a gender discrimination campaign at Yahoo and accused CEO Marissa Mayer of illegally purging male colleagues.
Scott Ard joined Yahoo in September 2011 and was unexpectedly fired in January 2015. Ard, now editor-in-chief of the Silicon Valley Business Journal, believes that he was fired because of his gender, emphasizing that his performance could not have possibly lead to termination of his contract.
In his lawsuit, Ard mentions the QPR Process, which stands for Quarterly Performance Reviews which is a performance system where an employee’s performance is rated. Ard complained about the QPR, which was adopted shortly after Mayer becomes a leading figure in the company.
“Marissa Mayer became CEO on a wave of optimism and then engaged in a sleight of hand to terminate large numbers of employees without announcing a single layoff,” Ard’s lawyer wrote on his behalf.
Ard claims that his case is not an isolated case. He said Mayer, backed by two other female executives, Kathy Savitt, former chief marketing officer, and Megan Liberman, editor-in-chief of Yahoo News, laid of more than 50 male co-workers within a one-month period, which he described as “intentional discrimination.”
To back his claim that it was gender discrimination, Ard described a case in which Savitt’s subordinate Susan Kittenplan looked to hire a female executive for the position of editor-in-chief of Autos Magazine.
Accusing Savitt of being biased towards female coworkers, Ard remembered one time that she allegedly said she downgrade a male employee just because she could.
“He just annoys me. I don’t want to be around him,” Ard remembers Savitt saying.
Allegedly, 87 percent of the newly hired or promoted personnel were female according the plaintiff.
A trial for his case has been scheduled for May.