Eight women have added their testimony to an ongoing class-action PlayStation sexism lawsuit filed in November 2021 by former IT security analyst Emma Majo, who accuses the US division of PlayStation of gender discrimination and wrongful termination.
She asserts that PlayStation has a hostile workplace against women which has led to the termination of female employees across the company, not only hers, as well as women being passed over for promotions and systemically receiving less pay than their male counterparts.
How eight women support the PlayStation lawsuit on gender discrimination
Sony has since “categorically” denied all of Majo’s allegations, going as far to ask the court to dismiss the lawsuit as, according to the company’s lawyer, “she fails to plead facts to support either her individual claims or the claims of the broad-based classes of women she seeks to represent.”
According to Axios, this prompted Majo’s attorney to file statements from eight women, including those that still currently work at PlayStation, who support her allegations.
Marie Harrington, who has worked for Sony Online Entertainment, cited that there were “calibration sessions” where the pool for one particular promotion was offered to nearly 70 men and only four women. Another woman revealed a third-party study that concluded that there was a “great imbalance in terms of employee distribution” on her team.
Kara Johnson, a former program manager, believes that “Sony is not equipped to appropriately handle toxic environments.” In her declaration, she shared a letter she wrote upon her departure to other female employees at the company stating that “a senior man in HR” resisted any attempts she made about gender bias and alleged discrimination of pregnant women.
This would be consistent with testimony from the other women who have experienced unwelcome advances and demeaning comments, their ideas frequently either ignored or discarded. As such, the testimony puts pressure on the court not to brush this Playstation sexism lawsuit under the rug.
Stephen Totilo, the Axios reporter who broke the story, revealed in a tweet that in the statements there were also “an account of an all-male gender diversity panel” and a woman who “put a checkmark in a notebook every time she was interrupted in a meeting (12-15 times per meeting).”
Sony has not yet responded to the additional allegations. That said, this casts a wide shadow over Jim Ryan, Sony Interactive Entertainment’s CEO, who chastised Activision Blizzard in a letter for their mishandling of numerous allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination.
In other news, PlayStation Productions is working on a God of War TV series and Capcom has revealed the dinosaur-hunting title Exoprimal during the PlayStation State of Play.
