Microsoft Gender Discrimination Suit Gets Green Light

A federal judge has declined to dismiss a lawsuit filed by three former Microsoft employees who said the tech giant’s pay and promotion practices effectively treated male and female employees differently. “At a minimum, the parties have set forth multiple plausible causes of the alleged disparate impact on female technical employees at Microsoft,” wrote U.S. Judge James Robart of Seattle. The case hinges on Microsoft’s controversial performance review system, which has since been adjusted. The method used then, called stack ranking, asked for managers to rank employees from best to worst on a scale of one to five. That system operated “in an environment overwhelmingly dominated by men,” the suit alleges, and thus awarded fewer raises and promotions to women in engineering roles than their male coworkers.