More than two years ago, gigantic video game publisher Activision Blizzard (the company behind Call Of Duty and Diablo, among many other things) was hit with a big lawsuit from California’s Department Of Fair Employment And Housing that accused the company of having a “frat boy culture” that involved regular discrimination and sexual harassment toward female employees. Now, the publisher has decided to pay about $54.9 million in a settlement, with about $45 million of it going into a fund to compensate workers (the agreement notes that all women who worked for Activision Blizzard between 2015 and 2020 may be eligible for compensation, which… says a lot about this company).
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This comes from Variety, which says that Activision Blizzard released a statement saying that it is “dedicated to fully implementing all the new obligations” it has accepted as part of this agreement, and that it wants its employees to know that “as the agreement, specifies, we are committed to ensuring fair compensation and promotion policies and practices for all our employees.” Those new obligations include using any excess funds from the settlement to support “charitable organizations focused on advancing women in the video game and technology industries” or for “promoting awareness around gender equality issues in the workplace.” The studio must also keep an “independent consultant” on hand in order to keep tabs on this stuff.
The initial lawsuit, which came after a multi-year investigation, claimed that Activision Blizzard had a history of failing to promote and of discriminating against them at every level of the company, with high level positions almost exclusively held by white men and women being consistently hired at lower positions, with lower salaries, and with fewer opportunities to be promoted. Female employees were also reportedly subjected to “cube crawls,” where male employees would drink alcohol and move from cubicle to cubicle and engage in “inappropriate behavior toward female employees.” Complains to HR would also regularly be ignored.
After the lawsuit came out, Blizzard president J. Allen Brack stepped down from the company and multiple walkouts were held in protest of leadership’s response to the reports about the toxic workplace—with one walkout coinciding with a campaign to oust CEO Bobby Kotick (one of the highest-paid executives in the whole industry), who had been accusing of not doing enough about the workplace culture even after a former employee claimed she was raped by a supervisor.
This settlement comes almost exactly two months after Microsoft’s attempt to purchase Activision Blizzard finally went through, and while we have absolutely no way of knowing if the timing is a coincidence, it does seem good for Microsoft that this will apparently be cleared up before the new year.