Foreign media The Verge reported“Pokémon Go” developer Niantic was sued by former employees on Friday, alleging that the company has systematic sex discrimination, especially against women of color. The lawsuit is currently recruiting more victims to fight class actions.
The complaint, an Asian woman, said in the complaint that he joined Niantic in February 2020 with a starting salary of $70,000 and that she was promoted and raised to $84,000 the same year, but around 2021 , she found that a man with a lower job title received a higher salary.
In 2022, although her position is still relatively high, the man earns $127,000 a year to her $105,000, and in the spring of 2023 she raises that to $115,000, still below her colleagues.
Later, when Niantic made the job title and salary range public under California’s Transparency Pay Act, she discovered that her salary was more than $10,000 less than the advertised minimum salary for the job class.
The employee was referred internally, but the indictment states that the company’s diversity equity and human resources colleagues told him that “Niantic’s male senior management was hostile to her complaints or issues of sexism or gender bias in the workplace. “
She also joined a female-dominated group at the company to discuss the matter. But Niantic’s senior executives said that discussing these things with her colleagues would affect the evaluation of her work, so she was afraid of affecting herself and others, so she withdrew from the group.
The indictment mentioned that after investigation by the female group, many female employees in the group actually believed that Niantic had a sexist work culture. When Niantic executives were notified of the findings of the investigation, CEO Mike Quigley demanded that references to them as a “boys club” and sexist terms be removed, and he also warned them not to conduct investigations on colleagues without the consent of senior executives.
At the end of June, Niantic went through a wave of layoffs that left more than 230 people out of work, including former employees who filed the lawsuit. Niantic is currently declining to comment on the matter.