Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer

Yahoo is making a lot of headlines on Tuesday and as it has been for a long time now, the news is mostly bad.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Web portal and search engine is about to layoff 15 percent of its workforce, which equals about 1,600 jobs. Then came word that a former employee is suing the company for violating labor laws and discriminating against — you guessed it — male employees.

When Yahoo reports fourth-quarter earnings, following the close of trading Tuesday, managers are expected to announce that revenues fell below $1 billion for the first time in a decade, according to Marketwatch.

Almost since the burst of the dotcom bubble in 2001, Yahoo has been one of the Web’s great providers of drama. The frustrated turnaround efforts have included numerous management shakeups and headcount reductions. The company’s business model was tweaked and re-tweaked. As for the number of rumors that have claimed Yahoo was an acquisition target, who can count?

More recently, some of the company’s investors have pressured management to finally sell the company, which may not possess much value beyond the shares it owns in Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce company.

Marissa Mayer, hired as Yahoo’s CEO in 2012, will announce Tuesday that in addition to the layoffs the company will close a number of business units, according to the Journal report.

As for the lawsuit, Gregory Anderson, an editor for some of Yahoo’s online news content until being laid off in 2014, alleged in a complaint that the company manipulated employee-performance evaluations to justify the process of firing hundreds, The New York Times reported. Anderson claimed that a revamped employee-evaluation system enabled management to discriminate by gender, and unfairly promoted female employees.

The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing is investigating, the Times reported. Yahoo said Anderson’s suit was without merit. 

 

 

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