The firing of James Damore at Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) has fueled a firestorm, this time involving white male employees who feel aggrieved. While focus has been on women and minorities, it appears that white males may also have issues of their own that need attention.
Male Discrimination
Prior to the Google software engineer being fired for questioning the tech giant’s diversity efforts, two men had already sued Yahoo. The two claim that the former CEO, Marissa Mayer, approved their dismissal on the basis of manipulated performance evaluations that only sought to favor women.
In Yahoo’s case, one of the complainants alleges that Mayer encouraged supervisors to evaluate employees mostly male using ‘subjective biases and personal opinions’ The lawsuit goes on to claim that women staffers accounted for up to 80% of the top management positions in the media position. The search giant has already refuted the claims maintaining that Mayer had little knowledge that led to the firing of the complainants in the case.
Tata Consultancy Services Limited (NSE:TCS) is another company at the center of claims that it discriminates against male staffers. Three men have sued the company over claims it discriminated against non-Indians in its U.S operations. The claims paint a completely different picture given that focus has always been on women, who are outnumbered 3 to 1 in the tech industry.
Diversity Stand Off
Just like Yahoo, Tata Consultancy has also refuted the claims maintaining that men in the company are yet to prove a pattern of discrimination.
Many women have come out claiming they have been blocked from promotion or fired because of their gender, rather than because of performance or talent. Discrimination against women is not something new but when men start to cry foul about mistreatment it raises serious questions about whether discrimination on the basis of gender even exists, or if it is imaginary, fomented by politics.
Allegations of discrimination on men in the recent past have only fueled backlash against diversity advocates. While the focus has always been on level and fair treatment of women in the workplace, many now fear that white males are being neglected on the assumptions that they are the majority in high-level posts.
Google stock was up by 0.95% in Monday’s trading session to end the day at $938.93 a share.
