In November of last year, the former IT security analyst Emma Majo sued PlayStation over its hostile workplace culture towards women and his unfair dismissal, which came after he complained about the sexism that permeates the company. Last month Sony tried to get rid of the lawsuit citing lack of evidence, to which Majo’s lawyer responded with statements of 8 womenincluding that of a current PlayStation employee.
According to Stephen Totilo of Axios, Sony’s lawyers told the court in a letter that Majo “failed to identify a single policy, practice, or procedure [de PlayStation] that allegedly forms the basis of intentional discrimination or a discriminatory impact on women”, but the new statements of the 8 employees and former employees describe aberrant behaviors in multiple PlayStation offices In U.S.A.
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Enter the behaviors described by women are demeaning comments, unsolicited advances, a lack of attention to your work or your ideas, and most often, a sense that it was more difficult for women to advance in the company than men. Some of the examples that women give in their statements are a all-male diversity panel and an employee’s habit of making a mark in her notebook every time she was interrupted in a meeting (with an average of 12 to 15 interruptions per meeting).
One of the statements comes from Marie Harringtonwho has worked with Sony Online Entertainment and Sony PlayStation for more than 16 years, and says that women were hardly considered for senior roles at the company during what he calls “calibration sessions”. According to what he says, in one session only four women were considered for the position, while there were about seventy men. That’s not all, as Harrington says she heard comments on family life of the female candidates that were not made on the male candidates.
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In 2018, The New York Times published an article describing sexism within Nike, to which Harrington took the opportunity to send an email to his superiors asking “Can we fix this before PlayStation has its own national news article?”. Four years later, it seems that the situation has not changed much.
“I think Sony is not equipped to handle toxic work environments properly.“, said Kara Johnson, another female filer who worked as a Program Manager. Among Kara’s statements is a letter she wrote to her colleagues when she left the company in January, citing repeated attempts to notify her superiors about sexism, discrimination against pregnant women and the resistance of an HR superior to take action on the matter. According to Kara, she was aware of 10 women who had resigned from her office in Rancho Bernardo, California, in the four months preceding her departure, which would be a sign of the systematic problem that PlayStation faces.
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Although Sony has not made any official statement so far, the new statements will make it less likely that the court will dismiss the case, as they now have more evidence of the toxic work culture that PlayStation employees face.