Female exec hired to help Magic Leap appeal to women sues for sex discrimination | Hacker News Reader

Female exec hired to help Magic Leap appeal to women sues for sex discrimination

theguardian.com

17 pointsdrewrv10 comments

Sadly, this doesn't sound far off from some situations I've been in and seen. It's a tragic cycle.

HR at Company X - "We don't have any women. We should hire some women. I don't really know why, I just read it in this newsletter that it's a good idea." First female employee - "I see why you don't have any women here. I quit." Executive at Company X - "Silly women. I told you we didn't need them after all."

I'm honestly not sure if it's that large groups of men tend to act like jerks toward women (which happens pretty often). Or that they become large groups of men when the women leave, if the men were acting like jerks to them. I rarely see a company becoming more diverse after that point, and then it seems to feed back in on itself, as part of the culture.

There's a lot you can do that isn't quite to the point of discrimination or harassment that can get people to leave, that's why it's such an insidious problem. And rarely are these places a great place to work for anyone.

> A new hire orientation included the unprepared advice: “in IT we have a saying; stay away from the Three Os: Orientals, Old People and Ovaries”. Campbell was told the person in question would not be giving new hire orientations in the future as a result, but that did not happen.

And from this Forbes article[1] :

> "All the engineers and others in predominately-male Magic Leap could conceive of to make the product female friendly was to produce a version in pink," the lawsuit said.

I can't imagine that a company like this wouldn't have many other major dysfunctional communication/team/management problems. In my experience, situations like this usually also come with teams people that can't deal with productive disagreement or differing opinions.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2017/02/13/former-ma...

"All the engineers and others in predominately-male Magic Leap could conceive of to make the product female friendly was to produce a version in pink"

However sad, this is not grounds for a legal case.

Most of the items in the article are like this.

She's offered evidence that ML is maybe not a great place to work for women in some ways, but none that they are acting in a discriminatory fashion.

Your first quote is particularly crude, but I don't even understand the context - why would they stay away form 'Old People' 'Ovaries' and 'Orientals'? There are tons of Asians in tech. Obviously extremely crude, but I don't even get the point of it.

Maybe there's more to it, or I missed something.

Seems like they need help, not to be sued.

> One of the three or four core apps that will ship with Magic Leap’s headset “is a game, ‘Dr. G.,’ that has no female heroes or lead characters”. The one female character in the narrative, who isn’t in the game itself, “is a busty woman depicted on her knees grovelling at the heroes’ feet in admiration”.

So in 2017 it's a hostile work environment if there aren't female characters in the video game that the company is producing?

I know that not the whole suite but, it highlighted as part of it.

Are people at the Gillette going to sue because they make a whole line of razors that are pink? Are people going to sue at fashion companies because the clothes they make are too revealing or tight?

Are we going to bring subjective criticism of art into the courtroom not out it own merits to society but, judging it on the basis of how it makes one of the employees of the company feel?

I'm not saying that the whole suite it without merit. This one point was just especially egregious to me.

People harping on these single points like the one which bothers you prevents action from occurring and quickly muddies the water. These claims are meant to be taken as a whole. It is about the environment that the little small things create as a whole, not an individual event.

The problem is that all of the points as a whole don't really amount to anything particularly bad.

Like, sure they aren't good, but if you have skin so thin that a few immature remarks and the lack of a gender in a video game is damaging to your life, it's nobody's problem but your own.

It's not necessarily a hostile work environment because of the game, but that's used as a minor piece of supporting information in the lawsuit. Other sources say that Campbell tried, in her capacity as head of strategic marketing, to get the developers to modify the game without success.

It's also worth noting that this game is one of the four default games that shipped with the product. It would be one thing if it were a game that was produced by the company and offered for purchase, but the fact that it came with the headset lends more credence to the argument.

This would be more like, if Gillette claimed to be targeting both males and females, but every single pack of razors had a bunch of unisex ones, and also one that had a picture of a shirtless beefcake fanning a fully-clad woman on a chaise lounge. ...And 97% of the engineers were female. And most of the men they hired were in marketing/office administrator roles. And a lot of other things.

I'm also not saying one way or the other about the suit having merit (no idea if the statements were true, there's always another side of the story), but it's a little more than just "someone thought a piece of art was sexist."

I can (kind of) understand racism. If you don't grow up, go to school, etc. with other races, they are "the unknown", "the other". I am not saying it is good by any means but I can see how it happens.

Misogyny though? That makes no sense to me. Pretty much everyone had a mom and a lot of people have sisters. Unless your grew up in Sparta, respecting women should inculcated by the time you you get old enough to work with women.

To the contrary, I would argue it's easy to fall into misogyny.

If the few women you had in your life as a kid were awful people, you could have subconsciously picked gender as an identifying marker of being an awful person. Add some teenage sexual frustration and bruised ego, mix, and let stew in your head for a few years.

"A new hire orientation included the unprepared advice: “in IT we have a saying; stay away from the Three Os: Orientals, Old People and Ovaries”. "

Oh wow. I thought my grandpa was the last person on Earth who actually still calls Asian people "orientals". Guess he ain't alone after all.

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