Activision Blizzard has been on the defensive after allegations of sexual harassment, discrimination, and underpayment of female staff have emerged from a lawsuit filed by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH). The company released a statement that attempted to diminish the allegations made by employees, calling the DFEH's descriptions of the work environment at the company "distorted." Since the filing of the suit, however, current Blizzard employees have begun voicing their solidarity with the accusers on Twitter.
The DFEH's case presents a long list of charges against Activision Blizzard, with the workplace being described as fostering a "pervasive frat boy culture," in which women were subjected to various forms of sexual harassment, including fending off "unwanted sexual comments and advances" by male employees, being groped by male employees as they drunkenly embark on "cube crawls" across the office (moving between various cubicles in the office while inebriated), and being subject to jokes about rape and comments regarding male employee's sexual partners.
The lawsuit is also centered upon an overarching attitude of discrimination at the company, with female employees being "overwhelmingly assigned into lower grades/levels" and women being offered less "lucrative job assignments" from hire and less pay and opportunities at the executive level. This is part of what the DFEH's suit against Activision Blizzard indicates is a pattern of discriminatory behavior that is perpetuated by the company's higher ups, and cemented by an HR department that treated complaints with a "perfunctory and dismissive" attitude.
Valentine Powell, User Interface Senior Software Engineer for World of Warcraft, started off a chain reaction of Tweets from their fellow Blizzard employees by posting that they did not "support any attempt by AB to diminish the very real damage done to victims of harassment at Blizzard," and that "We absolutely must hear and support the women at our company, both current and past." Other employees used the same words to voice their concurrence with Valentine's, including Senior Product Manager Ryan Davidson, Senior Concept Artist Janet Chu, and UI Designer Daniel Peterson. World of Warcraft players have also been protesting in-game in order to put forward their displeasure with the company's handling of the situation.
The tweets come after Activision Blizzard's statement on the lawsuit sparked further controversy for the company, with their claim being that the DFEH "includes distorted, and in many case false, descriptions of Blizzard's past." Activision Blizzard go on to suggest in the statement that the company has been "extremely cooperative with the DFEH," and that the DFEH's behavior is an example of how "unaccountable State bureaucrats" are "driving many of the State’s best businesses out of California." Many were baffled by the response, which made no mention of attempts to rectify the behavior of AB's employees and instead went entirely on the offensive.
Current and former employees have been stepping forward to corroborate the DFEH's claims, with Cher Scarlett, an ex software engineer at Blizzard, stating that she would be "hard-pressed to find someone that wasn't witness to sex in the game lounges, coke in the bathrooms during a cube crawl, or a woman who wasn't sexually harassed at least once." The allegations against Blizzard are, unfortunately, part of a what appears to be a larger problem in the industry, with a similar lawsuit brought by Solidaires Informatique against fellow gaming giant Ubisoft earlier in the month.
For Blizzard, the suit also comes at a time where the Overwatch League is being investigated by US Department of Justice for its potentially unlawful soft salary caps, and perhaps during a period of general disenfranchisement with the company by its fans, after the failed Warcraft 3 Reforged launch last year, controversy over the company's pro-China stance with regards to Hong Kong sovereignty, and issues with World of Warcraft Classic's overpriced content. The news of Activision Blizzard's internal attitude towards women, and the general pattern of inequity in the gaming industry, is sadly something that is not entirely unexpected. What has been unexpected, is Activision Blizzard's failure to listen to the women in its employ, past and present, and the company's refusal to make amends; especially when a plaque outside of Blizzard's headquarters reads "Every voice matters."