Activision Blizzard accused of fostering a hostile culture towards women, with harassment and firings

The state of California sues the company and even cites cases of suicide among its employees.

In the context of a general corporate crisis within some major video game publishers, including Ubisoft and Rockstar as examples, the California Department of Housing and Fair Employment (DFEH) filed a lawsuit against Activision Blizzard yesterday. for, they allege, promoting a discriminatory and toxic work culture for women who work within the company.

According to Bloomberg and Kotaku – who have echoed the same story – the lawsuit is the product of a two-year investigation that documents unequal treatment, harassment and harassment against the company’s women, who represent 20% of Activision Blizzard’s workforce.

Salary discrepancies, debts and pregnancy discriminationResearch ensures that women at Activision Blizzard cannot move up within the company as easily as their male counterparts and are more easily fired. It also documents wage discrepancies, debt, and pregnancy discrimination. Even more serious than this would be inappropriate practices on the part of the men of the company , in what is portrayed as a “culture of brotherhood”.

To illustrate the above, the complaint describes an internal tradition in which men get drunk and then crawl between company cubicles and subject their female colleagues to inappropriate behavior, not to mention blatant innuendo, touching, harassment and neglect. In addition, the lawsuit affirms that men tend to arrive with a hangover, play video games during working hours, delegate their tasks to women or evict their partners from breastfeeding spaces to hold meetings.

To top it off, the complaint assures that the human resources department is complicit in these offenses, by ignoring the complaints and, worse, betraying the complainants, making them the target of reprisals.

The lawsuit includes the suicide of an employee by harassmentOne case described as “particularly tragic” within the lawsuit refers to the case of an employee who committed suicide during a company trip due to harassment. The employee had a relationship with a superior in the company and, according to the testimonies collected by the prosecution, male Activision Blizzard workers had begun to share private photos of her and sexually harass her at a Christmas party prior to her death.

The California Department of Housing and Fair Employment seeks various types of compensation , injunctions against the company, payment for damages, payment of pending wages and payment of legal expenses, among others.

Activision Blizzard’s position

Kotaku shared Activision’s response to these allegations. The publisher claims to promote diversity and inclusion within the company , stressing that the lawsuit presents a distorted and often false image of Blizzard. “We have been extremely cooperative with the DFEH during their investigation, which includes providing them with extensive data and documentation, but they refused to inform us of the problems they perceived,” the company explained. Activision says the department was required to conduct a fair and open pre-lawsuit investigation but instead would have been quick to file an imprecise complaint, as they will show in court.

Activision Blizzard alleges that the company’s portrait is not currentActivision also showed its rejection of the department’s conduct by exposing the case of the employee who, unfortunately, took her own life and without having “consideration for her grieving family.” The company alleges that this suicide had nothing to do with the case. Also, the editor indicates that the portrait of Blizzard does not correspond to its current situation, because over the last few years, they have taken steps to transform the culture of the company.

“We are confident in our ability to demonstrate our practices as an equitable employer , promoting an encouraging, diverse and inclusive workplace for our people, and we are committed to continuing this effort for years to come. It is a shame the DFEH did not want to speak. with us about what they thought they were seeing in their research. “