Bloomberg Law has reported that Activision Blizzard is being sued by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing following a two-year investigation into claims the company discriminated against female employees.
Content warning: this article describes explicit examples of sexual harassment and discrimination. The full report provides even more allegations as well as mentions of suicide.
According to the complaint, filed Tuesday in the Los Angeles Superior Court, female employees make up around 20% of the Activision workforce, and are subjected to a “pervasive frat boy workplace culture,” including “cube crawls,” in which male employees “drink copious amounts of alcohol as they crawl their way through various cubicles in the office and often engage in inappropriate behavior toward female employees.”
The agency alleges male employees play video games during the workday while delegating responsibilities to female employees, engage in sexual banter, and joke openly about rape, among other things.
Female employees working for the World of Warcraft team noted that male employees and supervisors would hit on them, make derogatory comments about rape, and otherwise engage in demeaning behavior, the agency alleges.
The full court report provides many more allegations, including the following statement on Page 15 about Alex Afrasiabi, former Senior Creative Director for WoW who quietly left Blizzard Entertainment without fanfare in June 2020. According to the lawsuit, Alex Afrasiabi frequently harassed women, which other top members of Blizzard knew about but did little to curtail.
47. In a blatant example of Defendant’s refusal to deal with a harasser because of his seniority/position, Alex Afrasiabi, the former Senior Creative Director of World of Warcraft at Blizzard Entertainment, was permitted to engage in blatant sexual harassment with little to no repercussions. During a company event (an annual convention called BlizzCon) Afrasiabi would hit on female employees, telling him he wanted to marry them, attempting to kiss them, and putting his arms around them. This was in plain view of other male employees, including supervisors, who had to intervene and pull. him off female employees. Afrasiabi was so known to engage in harassment of females that his suite was nicknamed the “Cosby Suite” after alleged rapist Bill Cosby. Afrasiabi would also call females derogatory names at company events. Afrasiabi’s conduct was known to Blizzard Entertainment’s executives, who took no effective remedial measures. J. Allen Brack, President of Blizzard Entertainment, allegedly had multiple conversations with Afrasiabi about his drinking and that he had been “too friendly” towards female employees at company events but gave Afrasiabi a slap on the wrist (ie verbal counseling) in response to these incidents. Subsequently, Afrasiabi continued to make unwanted advances towards female employees, including grabbing a female employee’s hand and inviting her to his hotel room and groping another women.
In 2018, Riot Games was sued for gender discrimination, which sparked scrutiny of systemic problems, conditions and discrimination across the wider gaming industry. Blizzard has been in the spotlight recently for other workplace issues, most notably subpar wages for employees.
IGN has published a reply from an Activision Blizzard spokesperson:
We value diversity and strive to foster a workplace that offers inclusivity for everyone. There is no place in our company or industry, or any industry, for sexual misconduct or harassment of any kind. We take every allegation seriously and investigate all claims. In cases related to misconduct, action was taken to address the issue.
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.
The picture the DFEH paints is not the Blizzard workplace of today. Over the past several years and continuing since the initial investigation started, we’ve made significant changes to address company culture and reflect more diversity within our leadership teams. We’ve updated our Code of Conduct to emphasize a strict non-retaliation focus, amplified internal programs and channels for employees to report violations, including the “ASK List” with a confidential integrity hotline, and introduced an Employee Relations team dedicated to investigating employee concerns. We have strengthened our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion and combined our Employee Networks at a global level, to provide additional support. Employees must also undergo regular anti-harassment training and have done so for many years.
We put tremendous effort in creating fair and rewarding compensation packages and policies that reflect our culture and business, and we strive to pay all employees fairly for equal or substantially similar work. We take a variety of proactive steps to ensure that pay is driven by non-discriminatory factors. For example, we reward and compensate employees based on their performance, and we conduct extensive anti-discrimination trainings including for those who are part of the compensation process.
We are confident in our ability to demonstrate our practices as an equal opportunity employer that fosters a supportive, diverse, and inclusive workplace for our people, and we are committed to continuing this effort in the years to come. It is a shame that the DFEH did not want to engage with us on what they thought they were seeing in their investigation.
Cosby suite – Two words that describe things if its too long to read
Did my comment get deleted?
I didn’t delete anything, what did it say? If you had some swear words, links etc. then it might have been caught by the spam filter and automatically deleted.
I did post a link to the the official Hearthstone website playhearthstone dot com….. didn’t think that would get flagged though.
I may be mistaken, but I believe that any post with a URL in it has to be manually approved. If so, it is probably “pending”.
It is with sadness that I take those news. But I appreciate that you share this information with us and draw attention to this, Stonekeep. Feel free to update us on the issue if anything significant happens.
So, it turns out it’s very difficult to be a woman employees in Blizzard than trying to be a Blizzard fan these days. That’s sucks.
We’ve seen these controversials made by Blizzard, and I honestly think it’s getting worse. I believe we’re slowly seeing the ‘dark’ side of Blizzard company.
Well, I can only hope the people who are guilty can be punished severely. I mean, sexual harrasment is bad enough, but to an extend point as suiciding? That’s unthinkable.
Shame on you Blizzard.
After all the virtue signaling?
Maybe the next time some company paints their logo in rainbow colors or tweets about social issues people will realize it’s just to distract from things like this.
I mean that’s why you pay the lawyers the bug bucks to make it look like you’re the wronged party, fricking training means absolutely sweet FA as anyone who’s worked in an office environment knows, the only effective discouragement is HR action against offenders and to show nothing will happen to the accusers.
So, both sides have a strong reason to plead not-guilty then. But once these sorts of bad news hit the mass, what do you think would happen? The crowds has judged, the stocks has fallen, the fans leaving, etc.
My point is, these sort of things happen for a reason. We’re not just learning a thing or two.
Blizzard in it’s history is filled with controversies. And that’s a fact we won’t soon forget.