Is Twitter work culture discriminatory towards female employees? A former Twitter engineer claims it is!

Tina Huang, who according to her LinkedIn profile worked at Twitter between October 2009 and June 2014, recently filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against her ex-employer in California state court.

Huang has alleged that promotion opportunities are denied to women because of arbitrary promotion policies within Twitter that unlawfully favour men.

"The company's promotion system creates a glass ceiling for women that cannot be explained or justified by any reasonable business purpose.

"...because Twitter has no meaningful promotion process for these jobs -- no published promotion criteria, nor any internal hiring, advancement or application processes for employees," CourtHouseNews quoted from Huang's complaint.

In the complaint, Huang said she was passed over for promotion in 2013 without adequate explanation -- despite years of service, excellent evaluations by peers and supervisors and an absence of criticism or disciplinary issues.

Frustration with the opaque promotion process led Huang to email Twitter CEO Dick Costolo in March last year detailing her concerns.