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In mid-November Microsoft has announced a policy update of contrast to sexual harassment in the company. The initiative was born following the report, dating back to 2019, of inappropriate behavior by the same founder Bill Gates against an employee. Furthermore, in June of this year, two executives were accused of having shown “virtual reality porn” to some colleagues. Has been published a report of more than fifty pages which sheds light on the matter, commissioned by Microsoft itself, but compiled by independent observers.
The review process began in 2021, at the urging of the board of directors, and resulted in a public engagement of society to improve the transparencyincrease the training and awareness of managers on the issue of gender violence and promote the female leadership more effectively. However, some judged the initiative not very incisive. “The lack of detail or a proper scrutiny of events is particularly noteworthy, given that this is a process that began two years ago“, has written Kyle Barr on gizmode.
A mosaic of stories
It’s not the first time a tech company has been asked to publicly take responsibility against the sexism present in the workplace. The best known case is perhaps that of Uber: in 2017 the engineer Susan Fowler has denounced the culture of violence and harassment that female workers suffered in the company, and especially thesilence that they encountered when trying to bring their experiences to light. When a supervisor made a sexual proposition to Fowler and she reported the incident to human resources, she was told that the person in question had a “excellent working performance” and that he probably had just made a mistake.
She was given two choices: switch teams to no longer have to deal with the manager who had harassed her, or stay and give up to the fact that he would no doubt rate his work negatively. Starting to confront her colleagues, Fowler brought out a real hornet’s nest: many people had had the same or similar experience to his. The scandal culminated with the estrangement by former CEO Travis Kalanick and with the payment of approximately four million dollars to a fund for the employees involved (who, for the standard from Silicon Valley, I am very few).
In 2018 a item of the New York Times told how Google protect managers accused of inappropriate behavior giving them the option of remaining on the staff or of resigning without suffering consequences. Employees of twenty offices around the world they have abandoned the workplace in protest. Following the episode, Google has changed its policies with respect to the management of sexual harassment: it has in fact deleted the obligation to discuss cases at the headquarters of private arbitrationgiving victims the opportunity to go to court. Facebook and Microsoft they have some after a while following the example.
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