By Joel Rosenblatt
The way Tina Huang tells it, the path to her resignation from Twitter Inc. was a Kafkaesque experience. She said she was denied a promotion, led to believe her coding skills were inferior, asked to take a leave of absence, and scolded for taking that leave.
Two years ago, she sued, contending that the company systematically thwarts the advancement of female engineers. Since then, she’s been gathering data on gender and pay for her peers there and says she can prove Twitter stacks the deck. By January, she plans to ask a state judge for permission to represent 133 female engineers at Twitter, in what would be the first group case of its kind in Silicon Valley if certified.
Huang said in an interview the time is ripe to do something that’s never been done before: pry open entrenched, male-dominated barriers in the technology sector. One catalyst, she said, was a February blog post by former Uber Technologies Inc. engineer Susan Fowler, which detailed a predatory work environment, infighting, a “chaotic” organization and blatant sexual harassment. That post helped lead to the founder and chief executive officer’s ouster.
“You not only saw real action happen at Uber but you also saw the amount of the conversation” that followed, Huang said. “Women…
