Category: gender

A former Uber engineer sued the company, alleging that its “stack ranking” system of evaluating employees had an unfair and disproportionate impact on women.

Bloomberg reported on research about stack ranking:

Academic researchers have found that performance rating systems like stack rankings play to managers’ unconscious — and conscious — biases. Reviewing a decade of performance reviews at a “large professional services firm,” Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio, a senior research fellow at Harvard Law School, found that women were 1.4 times more likely than men to receive critical feedback in highly subjective categories.

For example, in one pair of reviews a female employee was described as having “analysis paralysis.” A man with the same behavior was praised for his careful thoughtfulness. “There is a lot of bias in the system, more than in the people,” Cecchi-Dimeglio said.

Microsoft faced similar litigation in 2015, and Goldman Sachs in 2010. Both those companies ended the practice, as did Uber before the filing of this lawsuit.

Litigation docket including complaint.

An October 2017 lawsuit alleged that Uber has discriminated against women and certain minority employees, leading them to receive reduced earnings, promotions, and benefits (including stock options and bonuses). The lawsuit argues: “In this system, female employees and employees of color are systematically undervalued compared to their male and white or Asian American peers.”