The video game industry has not finished with accusations of sexism.
After Ubisoft (Assassin's Creed) and Riot Games (League of Legends) in recent months, it is now publisher Activision Blizzard that is suffering a wave of accusations of sexism, both external and internal.
Based in Santa Monica, California, Activision Blizzard is one of the world's major video game players, including creator of the very popular “Call of Duty”.
To read also: Ubisoft: a quarter of employees testify to "bad behavior at work"
It all started with an investigation by a California state agency responsible for employee protection.
"Women are the object of constant sexual harassment, in particular by having to continually reject sexual comments (...) and advances",
criticizes the complaint filed on July 23 by the state agency to the American justice in following his investigation. According to this complaint, employees, who represent 20% of the workforce, are subject to an overload of work compared to their male colleagues, while having less favorable development and salary prospects.
Senior executives are also implicated in the investigation for their involvement in certain cases of sexual harassment.
But above all for not having reacted to complaints from their employees to Activision Blizzard's human resources.
According to the investigation, some of these complaints were spread by members of the HR department, close to those responsible for the harassment.
A demonstration Wednesday
In response, a company spokesperson said the allegations were based on "
distorted
" and "
in many cases false
" material belonging
to
the studio's "
past
". A reaction that scandalized some of the employees of Activision Blizzard. Some 2,600 of them, out of a total of 9,500 employees, signed a petition assuring that the complaint of the agency for the protection of employees reflected the excesses of the company. Published yesterday, the letter qualifies the spokesperson's reaction as "
odious and insulting"
and judges that the management does not take the measure of sexism in its workforce.
"This casts (...) a doubt on the capacity of the organization to hold the aggressors accountable for their acts and to support an environment sufficiently serene to allow the victims to come forward in the future",
say the signatories.
A few hours later, several hundred employees called a strike on Wednesday, July 28.
Among the demands of the organizers are the end of mandatory arbitration clauses (which prevent filing a complaint against the group), new recruitment and promotion policies, and the publication of statistics on the allocation of positions and salaries.
Read also: Sexism in video games: a "really worrying" phenomenon
Faced with the scale of the sling, the boss of Activision Blizzard Bobby Kotick ended up reacting on Wednesday by promising measures to combat harassment and discrimination.
“We will immediately assess the managers and directors of the company. Anyone who interfered with the integrity of our complaints and sanctions assessment process will be dismissed,
promises Bobby Kotick in a letter sent to his employees while admitting that his group had "
frankly turned a deaf ear
" in its initial reaction . The strike is maintained this Wednesday, July 28 and should be held in person in the Californian offices of Blizzard in Irvine as well as in virtual.
