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Pinterest announced this week that it would pay more than $ 20 million to settle a sex discrimination lawsuit filed by a female executive. But for two black ex-employees who had previously filed similar complaints, the settlement is a “slap in the face”.
Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks had become public figureheads for Pinterest after spearheading widely announced policy changes, including adding fact-checking features to vaccine content, which predated tech rivals like YouTube and Facebook . But internally, both former employees said, they faced setbacks.
In June 2020, after quitting their jobs with Pinterest’s policy team, they left went public claiming they had to fight to be paid fairly and retaliate for advocating change. Ozoma also said the company was not protecting her when a colleague shared her personal information with hate sites.
Ozoma and Banks left the company with six months of severance pay. But their public comments laid the groundwork for other women and people of color in the company to come forward with similar experiences.
Two months after their departure, former Pinterest COO Françoise Brougher sued the company for gender discrimination – the case that resulted in the $ 22 million settlement this week.
According to Jade Magnus Ogunnaike, the senior campaign director for the Color of Change organization for civil rights, the settlement is the latest example of a Silicon Valley company displaying unfair treatment of its black employees.
It shouldn’t go unnoticed that Pinterest has still failed to offer an apology or take action to be accountable to Ifeoma and Aerica – two black women whose courage to speak up led to a public inquiry into the company’s toxic work culture that likely influenced this week’s settlement, ”she said.
Banks said she and Ozoma decided to come forward in June as Pinterest, like many companies this year, made public statements in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“I couldn’t stand by and let a company get away with posting Black Lives Matter while they didn’t act like black lives that mattered in the negotiations they just concluded with us,” Banks told The Guardian. “This was about integrity and not letting the company get away with painting like this space for kindness and positivity, when they totally humiliated, abused and retaliated us.”
Meanwhile, these women’s allegations about working conditions at Pinterest have shaken the reputation of the tech company, which has a largely female user base and has long been seen as a “ fun ” alternative to Silicon Valley’s more cutthroat tech companies and tech companies. -bro culture.
Brougher made her lawsuit against her former employer public in August in a blog post entitled The Pinterest Paradox: Cupcakes and Toxicity, in which she wrote that although 70% of Pinterest users are women, the company is run by men with little input from female executives . . “
“Pinterest’s female executives, even at the highest levels, are being marginalized, excluded and silenced,” she said.
After the initial complaints from Ozoma and Banks, a group of Pinterest shareholders filed a lawsuit against company executives, including its CEO, Ben Silbermann, who claimed they were enabling a culture of discrimination. The complaint also alleged that culture of discrimination that has damaged Pinterest’s reputation and bottom line. She alleged that Silbermann had not acted on complaints.
“He repeatedly put himself in front of the company, surrounding himself with yes-men and marginalizing women who dared to challenge Pinterest’s white, male leadership clique,” the suit read. That case will be dealt with in 2021.
A Pinterest spokeswoman said the company does not share details about specific employee situations “out of respect for the privacy of those involved.” She said Pinterest released an independent review of workplace culture five months ago, which concluded this week.
That counseled Pinterest to require unconscious bias training for every employee, provide greater transparency and standardization around roles and their requirements to ensure different candidates are not under-promoted, and build a centralized team to address issues in the workplace.
In response to concerns about diversity, the company has “added diversity” to its board of directors by promoting different people of color, and “revamped and expanded” employee inclusion training. The company also announced a partnership with the NAACP to form an Inclusion Advisory Council.
“Pinterest is fully committed to making the changes recommended by the board’s special committee,” said the spokeswoman. “We value our employees and know that it is our responsibility to create a diverse, fair and inclusive environment for everyone at Pinterest.”
Banks said that what she and Ozoma came across on Pinterest has become common for women of color in the tech industry, who are hired to increase diversity and then fired for raising the issues they were hired for. She compared their experience to the controversy that surfaced at Google last week when a prominent black scientist studying the ethics of artificial intelligence said she had been fired after the company tried to suppress its research and criticized the efforts on the field of diversity.
“That’s why diversity isn’t enough,” said Banks. “That is why the representation in technology must be fair. It’s not enough just to have one person of color on a board or in the C suite. We need representation in technology that reflects the actual demographics of our country. “
The problems Pinterest faces come at a time of renewed attention to tech companies, from their diversity issues to their economic clout and the lack of regulation under review. Google has faced three antitrust cases in a row this fall, and Facebook is facing growing calls to be broken up.
“The era of self-regulation in the tech industry is over,” said Banks. “This is when outside forces come in and lead the industry in a way that the industry has denied for itself.”