2 Women Sue Twitter, Alleging Discriminatory Layoffs After Musk Takeover

Two women who lost their jobs at Twitter when billionaire Elon Musk took over are suing the company in federal court, claiming that last month’s abrupt mass layoffs of thousands of workers disproportionately affected female employees.

The discrimination lawsuit is the latest in a series of legal challenges over Musk’s rapid decimation of Twitter’s workforce.

Days after the world’s richest man bought the social media platform for $44 billion, the company on Nov. 4 told about half of its employees that they no longer had a job but would get three months’ severance. The lawsuit filed in a San Francisco federal court this week alleges that 57% of Twitter’s female employees were laid off, compared to fewer than half of its male workers, despite Twitter employing more men overall before the layoffs.

The cutbacks continued throughout November as Musk fired engineers who questioned or criticized him and gave all remaining employees the choice to resign with severance or sign a form pledging “extremely hardcore” work, long hours and dedication to Twitter’s new direction. Scores more lost their jobs after declining to make the pledge.

The lawsuit additionally contends that the required pledge also disproportionately harmed women, “who are more often caregivers for children and other family members, and thus not able to comply with such demands.”

San Francisco-based Twitter started the year with about 7,500 employees worldwide, according to a filing with securities regulators. Now a private company under Musk, it hasn’t disclosed how many employees remain. Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

The lawsuit was filed late Wednesday for former employees Carolina Bernal Strifling and Willow Wren Turkal on behalf of similarly situated female workers. The plaintiffs, who are scheduled to speak about the lawsuit on Thursday, are represented by prominent Boston workers’ rights attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, who ran an unsuccessful Democratic primary campaign for Massachusetts attorney general earlier this year.

The suit also alleges that the disparity between laid-off male and female employees in engineering-related roles is even greater than the overall gap, with 63% of women in those roles laid off, compared to 48% of men in similar jobs.

“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,” Liss-Riordan wrote in the lawsuit. “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.”

Speaking outside the courthouse before a hearing, Liss-Riordan said she wanted to show that “the richest man in the world is not above the law.”

“Musk and Twitter think they’re never going to be held accountable in court. We are arguing that the arbitration agreements (signed by Twitter staff) are not enforceable. But if we have to go through arbirtration one by one, we are ready to do that,” Liss-Riordan said.

“Of all the issues facing Elon Musk, this is the easiest to address: treat the workers with respect, pay them what they deserve under the law,” she added.

The lawsuit adds to a number of examples of discharged Twitter employees in the U.S. and elsewhere fighting back. One group of employees is filing individual arbitration claims in California because the documents employees signed when joining the company waived their rights to a class-action lawsuit and jury trial.

“As of today, we’ve filed five,” said their attorney Lisa Bloom in an email Thursday. “The number will continue to rise daily.”

In Ireland, a senior executive is fighting the company in court to get her job back after she didn’t respond to Musk’s email demanding employees make his pledge.

Sinead McSweeney, Twitter’s global vice president for public policy, won a temporary injunction last week preventing Twitter from terminating her employment, according to Irish news reports. The company told the Irish High Court that its human resources department intended to enter into talks with McSweeney to resolve the dispute, the reports said.

In a sworn statement to the court, McSweeney said many staffers in Twitter’s European headquarters in Dublin “expressed concerns and confusion” about Musk’s email.

McSweeney said she was forced to make a “completely artificial decision” that “placed me in an impossible and extraordinarily unfair and unjust position” between accepting a “unilateral change” in her terms of employment or being fired through a “sham resignation.”

After her lawyers received assurances from Twitter that her employment was still valid, she tried to return to the Dublin office, but found her access pass didn’t work. Security officials said they’d need to check with human resources to verify she was still an employee.

“I felt utterly humiliated, deeply confused and was reduced to tears in a public place,” she said.