PlayStation boss Jim Ryan criticized the company Activision-Blizzard (Call of Duty, WoW, Diablo) a week ago for how they are handling their sexism crisis. Now, a former employee of Sony in California has filed a lawsuit against her former employer. She feels unfairly treated because of her gender.
This is the situation:
- Activision Blizzard has been in a sexism scandal since 2021. A California agency sued the company for allegedly paying and treating women worse than men.
- In recent weeks, the conflict flared up again when allegations against the company’s CEO, Bobby Kotick, arose. However, the board has backed the company chief in a statement.
- Now, a former employee has made similar allegations against Sony.
Sony expressed “deep concern” about events at Activision Blizzard
This is what the PlayStation boss said about Kotick: The website Bloomberg has seen an internal email from PlayStation boss Jim Ryan, in which he responded to Activision Blizzard’s reaction to an accusatory article from the Wall Street Journal.
The email states that Sony had contacted Activision immediately, expressed its “deep concern,” and inquired how they plan to respond to the allegations in the article.
Furthermore, the email states that they do not believe the statements were the right reaction to address the situation.
We have discussed the situation surrounding the CEO of Activision Blizzard in detail in a podcast:
Analyst says she was overlooked for promotions and fired
This is now the lawsuit against Sony: An IT security analyst, Emma Majo, worked for Sony PlayStation. According to the site Axios, she filed a lawsuit on Monday, claiming she was discriminated against because of her gender and unlawfully terminated for speaking out against “discrimination against women” at Sony.
She is now trying to convince the court to expand her case into a class action lawsuit against Sony PlayStation.
It states:
- Sony discriminates against female employees in pay and promotions. Women at Sony are forced to work in a workplace culture dominated by men.
- Specific allegations include a manager ignoring her and only responding to men. She was overlooked for promotions and terminated in 2021 after complaining about discrimination at Sony.
- According to the analyst’s statements, other female employees have also had difficulty being promoted.
Is Sony now in the same situation as Blizzard? No, that is a different category. The lawsuit against Activision Blizzard came from an agency that has conducted investigations against Activision Blizzard for years and has conducted many interviews. When the lawsuit became public, many current and former female employees of Blizzard expressed on Twitter that there is substance to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit against Sony has hardly made waves so far. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen what judgment the court will come to in the case of the lawsuit.
MyMMO editor-in-chief Leya Jankowski has addressed the situation of Bobby Kotick in a column:
If Bobby Kotick doesn’t leave now, Activision Blizzard will lose more talent
