New stories of harassment and the "misogyny tax": the latest developments in the Activision Blizzard scandal

Over the weekend, a lot of fresh details appeared in the Activision Blizzard scandal. Several women have shared new stories about harassment in the company. And the former developer of Diablo and World of Warcraft called for the creation of trade unions in the gaming industry.New posts about working at Activision Blizzard

Several major publications published materials on the company’s internal cuisine at once.

The New York Times has a story about Shay Stein, a tech support employee who worked at Activision from 2014 to 2017. At the same time, her boyfriend got the same position with her, who always got more in the end. At one of the parties, Stein’s manager offered her drugs. According to her, men often joked that their female colleagues got a job only because they slept with their bosses.

Lisa Welch, who worked at Activision as vice president of consumer strategy and analytics from 2011 to 2016, also shared her story. According to her, one of the executives offered her sex after her boyfriend’s death because “she deserved some fun.”

A lot of material about Activision Blizzard’s corporate culture appeared on IGN. Some of the stories coincided with the accusations from the lawsuit, and some sources especially noted the “crazy” alcoholic parties. According to the publication, around 2015, at Blizzard’s main office in Irvine, women regularly faced harassment — they were especially often touched by their breasts.

A company representative said that in 2018 Activision Blizzard had to impose a ban on the consumption of more than two drinks at corporate events. Also, some employees regularly broke into the feeding rooms and looked at their female colleagues until the company installed locks on the doors.

Vice has published the story of information security specialist Emily Mitchell. In 2015, she was looking for a job and approached the Blizzard booth at the Black Hat conference. The employees of the company who were there made vulgar jokes about her T – shirt with the inscription: “Penetration Expert” (Penetration Expert). “One of them asked me when was the last time I was penetrated,” Mitchell recalls.

“The Misogyny Tax”Another Blizzard-related incident was mentioned in Emily Mitchell’s story.

Two years after the incident at the Black Hat conference, the company needed the services of the cybersecurity firm Sagitta HPC.

Blizzard’s request was personally answered by the company’s founder, Jeremy M. Gosney. It turned out that he was aware of the incident with Mitchell, because at that time she was working at Sagitta HPC as an operating director.

Gosney was outraged by the behavior of Blizzard employees, but did not refuse to work with the company. Instead, he offered her a chance to “redeem herself” and put forward several conditions for cooperation. One of them was the so-called “misogyny tax”.

Blizzard had to pay 50% more for Sagitta HPC services. Gosney suggested donating this “tax” to charities that help women in the field of development. He also demanded that the company apologize to Mitchell and become the “golden” sponsor of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference.

However, Blizzard did not agree to these terms. According to Gosney, the company has made “a lot of empty promises about internal investigations and anti-harassment training.”

Statement by a former Blizzard developerJeff Strain shared with IGN a letter that he sent to the staff of his Undead Labs studio.

According to him, the lawsuit against Activision Blizzard did not surprise him at all, and it was because of the corporate culture that he left the company at the time.

In his letter, the developer spoke about the importance of creating trade unions in the gaming industry. In light of the events surrounding Activision Blizzard, he also called on his company’s employees to unite.

“In this country, trade unions were created to protect workers from abusive, harsh, disgusting, unacceptable and illegal treatment. That’s their whole purpose. If this week we don’t show that our colleagues in the industry — even novice testers — need real support and basic protection, I’m afraid to imagine how much worse the situation could get,” said Strain.

“The problem of denunciations”On July 30, Activision Blizzard’s senior president of corporate Affairs, Frances Townsend, shared on Twitter a link to an article in The Atlantic.

In the message, she also wrote about the “problem of denunciations.”

These words were just connected with the situation inside the company. Many users found such rhetoric of the top manager inappropriate – especially after she called some of the accusations against Activision Blizzard false and distorted. Among the dissatisfied were the company’s employees.

According to Jason Schreier, Townsend started blocking tweets criticizing her position. “I myself like to ban people on Twitter for the benefit of my mental health, but I have never seen a top manager block his own employees,” the journalist noted.

Previously, Townsend has been at the center of scandals more than once. While working in the administration of President George W. Bush (George W. Bush Bush) she defended the use of torture by the American authorities.