Two female former employees of Twitter have filed a class-action lawsuit against the San Francisco-based company, alleging recent job cuts disproportionately targeted women.
Carolina Strifling and Willow Wren Turkal filed their complaint in Court in the Northern District of San Francisco, on behalf of themselves and other female employees who have lost their jobs since Elon Musk’s $44bn takeover of Twitter at the end of October.
They argue that Twitter’s actions violate sex discrimination protections of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the California Fair Employment and Housing Act.
The discrimination lawsuit states that Twitter laid off 1,271 or 57% of its female staff, compared to 1,350 or 47% cent of men at the company - even though the company employed more men before the layoffs - and therefore the layoffs disproportionately affected female employees.
According to the lawsuit, the disparity was even greater among Twitter’s engineers, where 63% of women were laid off, compared to 48% of men.
The lawsuit states:
“The mass termination of employees at Twitter has impacted female employees to a much greater extent than male employees – and to a highly statistically significant degree. Moreover, Elon Musk has made a number of publicly discriminatory remarks about women, further confirming that the mass termination’s greater impact on female employees resulted from discrimination.
Since Musk took over the company, Twitter have laid off around half of its 7,500 workforce in the US and hundreds of others have resigned, as they were unwilling to commit to “working long hours at high intensity.”
Strifling - who worked at Twitter since June 2015 - and Turkal - who worked at Twitter since June 2021 - state that the new policies asking employees to work longer hours would have also disproportionately affected women, “who are more often caregivers for children and other family members, and thus not able to comply with such demands”.
The lawsuit maintains that decisions about which employees would lose their jobs were “made under extremely hurried circumstances, with little if any regard given to employees’ job performance, qualifications, experience, and abilities”. Apparently some employees only became aware they would lose their job when they had their access to Twitter’s systems cut off and decisions over who was to be let go were reportedly made by a small group of managers working under Musk’s supervision, with some even working for other companies owned by Musk such as Tesla.
At a press conference Shannon Liss-Riordan - the Claimants’ lawyer - said:
“It’s not a huge surprise unfortunately that women were hit so hard by these layoffs when Elon Musk was overseeing these incredibly ad hoc layoffs just in a matter of days.”
This lawsuit is the latest case as there have also been at least three complaints against the company filed with the US National Labor Relations Board. Other cases brought by former Twitter staff claim that the company failed to give employees and contractors notice before dismissing them; failed to pay severance and forced workers with disabilities out of their jobs.
