YAHOO CEO Marissa Mayer is being sued by a male ex-Yahoo employee who has accused her of gender bias.

Scott Ard, a male employee who was fired in 2015, launched a lawsuit against Mayer this week in federal district court in San Jose, accusing her of leading a campaign to purge male employees.

Ard, who was in charge of the company's media section at Yahoo for three-and-a-half years, claims an unfair review process was put in to rank staff against one another and benefit women after Mayer took over the firm in 2012.

“Mayer encouraged and fostered the use of (an employee performance-rating system) to accommodate management’s subjective biases and personal opinions, to the detriment of Yahoo’s male employees,” the court document says.

Ard claimed female managers made a concerted effort to have more females enter management.

Ard claimed he had received "fully satisfactory" performance reviews since starting at the company in 2011 as head of editorial programming for Yahoo's home page. However, his role was suddenly given to a woman who had recently hired, says the suit.

Ard alleged he was fired a few months later, in January 2015, because "his performance was not satisfactory".

A spokeswoman for Yahoo, Carolyn Clark, was quoted in Mercury News stating Yahoo couldn't comment on pending litigation, but insisted the company conducts performance-reviews based on "fairness".

"Our performance-review process was developed to allow employees at all levels of the company to receive meaningful, regular and actionable feedback from others," Clark said.

"We believe this process allows our team to develop and do their best work. Our performance-review process also allows for high performers to engage in increasingly larger opportunities at our company, as well as for low performers to be transitioned out."

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The news comes at a bad time for Yahoo, who is currently mopping up the mess of a large scale security breach which saw the details of 500 million users — including up to eight million Brits — stolen by what it described as a “state-sponsored actor”

Earlier this week, experts also warned that web users with Yahoo email addresses should delete them right away following  news that the tech giant had created a tool for the US government to scan through people’s private messages.

Reuters revealed the company had worked with either the FBI or the National Security Agency to allow spooks unhindered access to Yahoo email databases.

Even messages from people using other email providers such as Gmail or Hotmail could have been secretly read by government agents.

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