California sues Activision Blizzard over unequal pay, sexual harassment

I&#x27;m really surprised that Blizzard thinks a state suit against them for sexual discrimination, harassment, and a litany of odious behaviors by managers is best answered by calling them &quot;unaccountable State bureaucrats,&quot; as they did in their PR damage control release. It&#x27;s like they think it&#x27;s 1995 and MeToo never happened.<p>In the suit, the state even attempted a mediated resolution to prevent it from going to court. But Blizzard refused to cooperate, essentially taunting the state to bring a case, which they now have.<p>It really makes you question whether Bobby Kotick is the right guy as CEO. Not only did he fail to demonstrate ethical leadership, but his handling of this crisis is massively destructive of shareholder value.

Blizzard&#x27;s full response: &quot;The DFEH includes distorted, and in many cases false, descriptions of Blizzard’s past. We have been extremely cooperative with the DFEH throughout their investigation, including providing them with extensive data and ample documentation, but they refused to inform us what issues they perceived. They were required by law to adequately investigate and to have good faith discussions with us to better understand and to resolve any claims or concerns before going to litigation, but they failed to do so. Instead, they rushed to file an inaccurate complaint, as we will demonstrate in court. We are sickened by the reprehensible conduct of the DFEH to drag into the complaint the tragic suicide of an employee whose passing has no bearing whatsoever on this case and with no regard for her grieving family. While we find this behavior to be disgraceful and unprofessional, it is unfortunately an example of how they have conducted themselves throughout the course of their investigation. It is this type of irresponsible behavior from unaccountable State bureaucrats that are driving many of the State’s best businesses out of California.&quot;

In case anyone is interested, the WoW subreddit has put together a list of former and current female employees confirming and commenting on these allegations: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;wow&#x2F;comments&#x2F;op1t7m&#x2F;activision_blizzard_sued_by_california_over_frat&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;wow&#x2F;comments&#x2F;op1t7m&#x2F;activision_bliz...</a>

I often wonder how does nobody say anything?<p>Then I remember when a recruiter told a friend on speakerphone that they thought he wasn&#x27;t a culture fit and he asked what they meant and the recruiter said &quot;Everyone here is young and they were worried you&#x27;re too old.&quot;<p>I didn&#x27;t say anything, he didn&#x27;t ... at that time we needed a job &#x2F; to break into the industry, not to get our names out there in a fight about a place that didn&#x27;t want to hire guys like us. (We&#x27;re both doing fine now.)

This part really helps put it into perspective:<p>&gt; In a tragic example of the harassment that Defendants allowed to fester in their offices, a female employee committed suicide while on a company trip due to a sexual relationship that she had been having with her male supervisor. The male supervisor was found by police to have brought a butt plug and lubricant on this business trip. Another employee confirmed that the deceased female employee may have been suffering from other sexual harassment at work prior to her death. Specifically, at a holiday party before her death, male co-workers were alleged to be passing around a picture of the deceased&#x27;s vagina.<p>(I had to manually type that out because the source doc is a scanned PDF; might have typos)<p>source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aboutblaw.com&#x2F;YJw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aboutblaw.com&#x2F;YJw</a>

Fucking disgusting. Reading this makes my blood boil.<p>This is a big reason why me and my other female engineer friends ask about gender ratio during job interviews: sometimes a mostly male organization will be treat its female employees fine, but sometimes it will disrespect them, harass them, and treat them like garbage.

&quot;&#x27;akin to working in a frat house.&#x27;<p>Male employees drank on the job and came to work hungover, the lawsuit said.&quot;<p>Isn&#x27;t that the big selling point of game industry - the hours can be terrible but the free snacks&#x2F;beer&#x2F;games culture keeps people there?<p>The other stuff seems pretty bad.

I worked for AB a few years back and it was easily the worst job I&#x27;ve ever had. Incredibly toxic work culture, and frequent gaslighting by managers. I&#x27;ll never work for a big games company again after that experience.

The accusations I&#x27;ve been reading are simply awful and outright depressing. A woman may have committed suicide over the harassment.

I had been considering resubbing and trying out The Burining Crusade in WOW, but then I found Final Fantasy XIV. I&#x27;ve played many FF games over the years. My cousins played FFXI but I was too young to play at the time so I never got to. I love MMOs and for me there is nothing like the excitement of playing a good MMO with friends. It&#x27;s just nice to play a game whose leadership makes the player base feel as if they are important. Obviously we can never know what is actually going on behind Square Enix&#x27;s doors but Yoshi-P makes me believe the things he says are true at least.<p>I&#x27;m tired of playing games whose companies are actively hostile to the players (and to be fair after the whole Artifact debacle I&#x27;m starting to feel this way about Valve too).<p>When I was younger I never considered myself someone who would be playing older games (early 2010s and older) instead of the latest ones. I used to be so excited for the new releases. But a game without microtranscactions, little to know DLC and a good modding scene has become more important to me than the newest stuff. It&#x27;s honestly been disheartening as a gamer to have lost my enthusiasm for the newer stuff. But maybe part of that is just getting older and busier as well.<p>On the bright side my hardware is plenty powerful for the games I play, which is great considering the silicone shortage and all.

Most of this sounds horrifying, and if its true I hope they throw the book at them.<p>However this one line seems like it would be hard to prove:<p><i>They(women) were also assigned to lower-level positions and passed over for promotions, despite doing more work than their male peers in some cases</i><p>I know many people who are really good at filling out their TPS reports, and never break the rules. They don&#x27;t ever get promoted, because they do so much in their current role, and since they never break the rules, they never get to be highlighted for &quot;showing initiative.&quot; Though if the rest of it proves to be true, it would not look good.

So....if you&#x27;re a single guy, and you start a company and you WANT to have a party place with frat house attitude and exercise your right to the pursuit of happiness in life, I take it that a company founder that is a guy should only hire other single men that share those same values?<p>I don&#x27;t know, I&#x27;m just asking other&#x27;s opinions here.

This issue is endemic and has been a constant problem throughout my career. They’re just big enough that they got caught.

I find the comments section here to be about 60&#x2F;40 men who believe it to be a problem, and men who are denying there are problems or minimizing&#x2F;excusing them, which matches my experience w men in workplaces. Long looong way to go.

Australian here. Could someone explain why the state government is suing anyone? Wouldn&#x27;t it be more normal to charge them with breaking a law?

On topic: Does anyone know if there is some precedent for lawsuits like this? From years of experience in the art of existing as a human, I would guess A-B can&#x27;t possibly be the only organization with these problems, but if a lawsuit like this has happened before, it must have been targeting a much lower profile company that flew under my cultural radar.<p>Mostly off topic: I wouldn&#x27;t consider myself a gamer (anymore), and I get that it&#x27;s about high revenue examples, but I thought &quot;Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush&quot; was quite the structural anapest to begin the article.

Apparently one director had groped so many women that his suite was known as the &quot;Cosby Suite&quot;. As spoken by one of the victims [0].<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;skrutsick&#x2F;status&#x2F;1418006293495762944?s=20" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;skrutsick&#x2F;status&#x2F;1418006293495762944?s=2...</a>

I posted saying yesterday that Blizzard&#x27;s fall from grace has been absolutely spectacular to watch<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27911924" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27911924</a><p>then 2 hours later this news appeared<p>apparently there&#x27;s worse news coming out later this week too

A lot more on the topic here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;wow&#x2F;comments&#x2F;op1t7m&#x2F;activision_blizzard_sued_by_california_over_frat&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;wow&#x2F;comments&#x2F;op1t7m&#x2F;activision_bliz...</a><p>Apparently their office was basically a frat house.

So, what happens to the Diablo servers and, given the drm, Diablo itself, once the company shuts down &#x2F; gets bankrupt?<p>I should at least hurry and play my copy while the servers are still running, I guess.

Get out of Ca.

A federal mandate on pay transparency would put an end to all of the unequal pay issues once and for all. What’s the downside?

&gt;Years after the online harassment campaign known as Gamergate targeted women in the video game world<p>Ironically, GamerGate started as an expose on how dishonest and corrupt video game journalism had become, though it all went downhill from there. And now journalists dishonestly hijack GG to push whichever agenda suits them, though at least this time the writer didn&#x27;t act as if it was still relevant today.

If you&#x27;re reading this, there&#x27;s a pretty solid chance that you&#x27;re a male working in the software industry.<p>It is super, super critical for you to know: <i>this happens where you work, too</i>.<p>No, not &quot;this could happen where you work.&quot; I&#x27;m telling you that if you work with women in engineering, they deal with this shit anywhere from weekly to hourly.<p>It comes from &quot;the nice manager,&quot; from a QA on another team, from a tech lead, from a customer.<p>Misogyny and harassment <i>are happening around you</i>, and you need to be looking for it.<p>If your first thought upon reading this was &quot;well, I&#x27;m just glad that could never happen <i>here</i>,&quot; you are wrong, and you need to be on your guard.

I am big proponent of STFU and do your job. No &quot;we are family here&quot;. No dating people from work. Because some people really really need that next pay-check. There are people paying off their chemotherapy that have to go to work reading about this and worrying about their livelihood. Nobody deserves that. Nobody has a right to get you to worry about how are you gonna survive next mortgage payment. And over what? people acting like they are in highschool. Stuff like this boils my blood before we even get to politics. Life is hard enough. I will not burden you with my family issues and I will work as hard as I can but in return you let me do the work and worry only about what I am working on. Everything else goes under grow the f up and get a life outside company.