SEXUAL orientation-related and sexual discrimination at at workplace are a common theme. Microsoft's propaganda mills, however, tried to stigmatise FOSS as hostile to minorities, women, and whatever else isn't white, straight, middle-aged men.
Microsoft will have to defend itself against a lawsuit alleging that its employee rating system was biased against women.
A US district court in Washington has tossed out [PDF] the Redmond giant's motion to dismiss a complaint lobbed at it by three women engineers, who allege the system for evaluating engineering and technical positions unfairly penalized them.
At issue is the Windows giant's "Connect" system, the evaluation method Microsoft used to replace the much maligned "stack ranking" process for evaluating employee performance.
The engineers allege that the review system relies on manager and peer input from a group that is overwhelmingly male and, as a result, the female employees they evaluated may have missed out on raises and promotions.
"Plaintiffs allege these performance evaluation methods are 'invalid' because they 'set arbitrary cutoffs among performers with similar performance' and are 'not based on valid and reliable performance measures'," the court's ruling, dated October 14, reads.