Women take Twitter to court, claim Elon Musk layoffs unfairly targeted female staff

By Team Newsable | First Published Dec 9, 2022, 12:52 PM IST

Two women who lost their jobs at Twitter during mass layoffs after Elon Musk took over the company are suing, claiming that the company disproportionately targeted female employees for cuts. The new suit, filed on Wednesday in San Francisco federal court, said that Twitter laid off 57% of its female workers compared with 47% of men.

Two female employees who lost their jobs at Twitter after Elon Musk took over are suing the firm in a US court, claiming that the sudden mass layoffs unfairly impacted female workers. Days after Musk, the richest man in the world, paid $44 billion to purchase the social networking site, a mass layoff started. On November 4, Twitter told around half of its workforce that they were losing their jobs but would get a three-month severance package.

In response to the widespread layoffs, which two women claim were directed specifically at them, they have now launched a lawsuit. In spite of Twitter employing more males overall prior to the layoffs, the case filed in a federal court in San Francisco claims that 57% of female employees were let go, compared to less than half of male employees.

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Women, who "are more frequently caretakers for children and other family members, and hence are unable to comply with such requests," according to the lawsuit, were also disproportionately disadvantaged.

Carolina Bernal Strifling and Willow Wren Turkal, two former employees, brought the action on behalf of other female employees in a similar situation.

Reports suggest that Liss-Riordan said, “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."

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Elon Musk has also made a number of overtly discriminatory comments about women, which she said "further confirms that the mass termination's higher impact on female employees was the product of prejudice."

Elon Musk dismissed engineers who questioned or challenged him, and all remaining workers were given the option to quit with severance pay or sign a contract committing "extremely hardcore" effort, long hours, and devotion to Twitter's new path. The layoffs continued into November. After the deadline, a large number more quit.

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