Email Scandal, Discrimination Lawsuit: Yahoo Battered by Barrage of Bad News

Yahoo’s streak of bad news continues. Shortly after being acquired by Verizon for $5 billion, the company confirmed rumors of a massive security breach from 2014 affecting at least 500 million users, believing it was a “state-sponsored actor.”

Then it was revealed that Yahoo has been secretly scanning emails before they reach recipients—and that data was being turned over to US intelligence, found Reuters. Oops.

After that, Yahoo got caught making it unnecessarily difficult to actually leave their mail service, despite having lost users’ trust. The company had the audacity to disable email forwarding at the beginning of the month, making the switch to a new email service a struggle, according to the Associated Press.

And now Yahoo is being sued—well, specifically CEO Marissa Mayer, who allegedly led a purge of male employees to falsely accelerate workplace “equality”—at the very obvious expense of an entire gender. The irony is real.

“Mayer encouraged and fostered 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,” reads a lawsuit suit filed by Scott Ard in federal district court in San Jose. Ard was a prominent local media executive who felt among several unfairly dismissed by Mayer and co.

A (female) spokeswoman defended Yahoo’s process, saying the performance reviews revolved around “fairness.”

Ard’s lawsuit, meanwhile, argues that “the process allowed high-level managers to arbitrarily change scores of employees they had no contact with, and it “permitted and encouraged discrimination based on gender or any other personal bias held by management.” It notes that over an 18-month period, 87% of senior-level editorial employees hired were female.