Yahoo! harassment suit

[Octavo]

TL;DR version: A coder joins Yahoo! and gets housed with her boss. Boss demands sexual favours and threatens loss of income. Coder finally refuses advances and is duly fired. Yahoo! immediately back the boss to the hilt.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/14/nan_shi_maria_zhang_harassment_suit/

Court filing [PDF]: http://regmedia.co.uk/2014/07/14/nan_shi-vs-maria_zhang.pdf

I would have thought that HR would have prevented something like this from happening by having rules around housing assignments like this.

 

[Puppycow]

There's also a countersuit for defamation:

http://www.newser.com/story/191055/female-yahoo-exec-fires-back-at-harassment-suit.html

(NEWSER) – The female Yahoo executive accused of coercing a female subordinate into sex has fired back with a lawsuit of her own, accusing former employee Nan Shi of making the whole story up for money. In the countersuit, Maria Zhang says she never had sex with Shi, whom she says concocted the story "to save her job and avoid losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in unvested Yahoo stock," the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Zhang is suing for defamation and seeking damages for emotional distress.

 

[Babbylonian]

There's also a countersuit for defamation:

http://www.newser.com/story/191055/female-yahoo-exec-fires-back-at-harassment-suit.html

According to Zhang's version of events, Shi—who joined Yahoo with Zhang when it bought the mobile start-up Zhang founded—started to complain to human resources earlier this year and only made the sexual harassment claim after her request for a transfer was denied.

Sure, that could mean she's fabricating the sexual harassment claim...or it could mean she tried to get a transfer because of the sexual harassment but wanted to try keeping it on the down low.

I don't know the truth of the story but firing someone who has made a sexual harassment complaint seems like a bad idea. I can't help but wonder if Ms. Shi's Chinese citizenship was a factor in that decision; if she's on a limited work visa Yahoo might have figured that firing her (and rendering her stock options worthless) would inevitably result in her going back to China - problem solved.

 

[theprestige]

In what parallel universe of Going Full Retard does it make sense for an employee to live with their supervisor? I hope to god Yahoo! is making the right PR moves in public, and cutting this epic dysfunction out of their culture root and bough behind closed doors.

 

[jj]

In what parallel universe of Going Full Retard does it make sense for an employee to live with their supervisor? I hope to god Yahoo! is making the right PR moves in public, and cutting this epic dysfunction out of their culture root and bough behind closed doors.

You know, sometimes you're just right, "theprestige", and this is one of them.

This one is full of cosmic WTF.