Musk hit with lawsuits for laying off women 'disproportionately', former Twitter cleaning staff allege they were treated like garbage

‘Chief Twit’ Elon Musk has faced another round of lawsuits from former employees, this time for allegedly targeting female employees for layoffs.

Two women Carolina Bernal Strifling and Willow Wren Turkal, who got fired when Musk took over the reins of the microblogging platform are now dragging the company to court, claiming that the abrupt spate of mass layoffs last month, affected female employees disproportionately.

According to Forbes magazine, the lawsuit filed in a San Francisco federal court, alleges that 57 per cent of female employees were laid off, compared to less than half of men, despite Twitter employing more men overall before the layoffs. The Associated Press reported that the lawsuit claimed that as “women are more often caregivers for children and other family members, and thus not able to comply with such demands,” the layoffs “disproportionately harmed” them.


“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. 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,” the lawsuit stated.

Last month, Musk came under fire when a user named Lauren Chen shared a picture of Twitter’s workforce before and after the layoffs.

Titled 'Twitter before Elon vs Twitter after Elon', the post shared two pictures. The one that depicted pre-layoff staff had a healthy mix of both genders, The picture of the post-layoff workforce however told a different story. It comprised an all-men team. This did not escape the notice of netizens.
The suspicious lack of women employees became even more conspicuous when Musk shared pictures from the Twitter headquarters. One user commented, "Women had enough sense to leave the company with severance.'' Another wrote, ''All of the women are gone in the second photo.'' A third chimed in, ''Omg he removed all the women!"
This however was far from the only example of Musk clashing with former employees , or facing allegations of exploitation and ill-treatment.

A group of cleaners and janitors who were fired from Twitter, told the BBC on Monday (December 5) that they were “treated like garbage.” One of the former cleaning staff told BBC that Musk threatened them that their jobs would be replaced by robots.

Adrianna Villarreal, who worked for Twitter for four years, said she's now worried she won't have enough money to feed her family over Christmas." It's a sad and frustrating thing for our families and children," she said