A lawsuit was filed against the famous gaming company, Activision Blizzard for accepting and promoting frat-boy culture in their workforce. This lawsuit was filed on Tuesday, 20th July 2021 in the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing.
The company has been accused of sexually harassing its women staff force and exploiting them. They are even paid less and promoted less than the male staff at the company thus has been seen promoting patriarchy.
Due to an issue that was highly focused on women’s rights and women’s exploitation it was the duty of the state agency to conduct a two-year extensive exploration of this company based in the Santa Monica region. This company has a total of 9,500 employees. The investigation led to the conclusion that the company has always exploited its female staff and has preferred the male staff more. This can be easily understood by the percentage of females working in the company which is only 20% of the 9,500 employees.
The state agency filed this complaint on Tuesday in the Los Angeles Superior Court stating that the female employees working here are paid less even in their starting salaries and years beyond. The males are paid more even for the same work. The company even promotes the female slowly and fires them quickly if they ever commit a mistake. While the males are promoted more often and are not terminated quickly. There are certain rules and terms the females need to abide by which often forces her to leave the job, said the state agency.
Talking about the frat-boy culture promoted in the company, the males over here engage in cube crawls. These men who belong to a fraternity often showcase themselves as highly able and have an egocentric, male-dominated personality issue. They drink during their working hours which is allowed by the company itself and engage in detailing behaviors like grouping in the female staff making it an uncomfortable environment for the female.
These men crawl through their team members with no sense of what they are doing, working on. Women over often receive sexual comments about their physique which they have to ignore to be able to work over their peacefully.
The lawsuit against the company has various instances of women who proudly stood for their rights and fought for them. One such instance is when a woman stood up and asked for extra pay for the extra work that she had provided to the company. She asked her manager, who was a male supervisor for the additional pay. As expected the male manager gave a very sexist reply to this demand. He said that the company wouldn’t risk by promoting her as in a few years she might get pregnant and have babies and would start liking her motherhood so much that she wouldn’t be able to handle the job very well.
Other women complain about how their male counterparts never respected the females over there and often commented on them when they left from work to pick up their kids from daycare. Some women were kicked out of the lactation rooms to attend business meetings. These things need to be addressed by the court.
A female worker even committed suicide due to been harassed by her male co-workers on a business trip and these male co-workers even had the audacity to circulate nude pictures of these women at a holiday party.
In a statement, the spokesperson of Activision Blizzard talked about how their company focuses on promoting diversity and integrity of all and their company doesn’t foster sexual misconduct of any gender, harassment of any kind, etc. They even said that whatever allegations are being accused at the company will be addressed in a fair and legal manner and every citizen’s rights will be protected.
The company with no shame states that the allegations against them are distorted and there are many false allegations and complaints against them being pointed out in the company. They said it is “not the Blizzard workplace of today.” and only existed in the past.
