Riot Games agreed to pay out at least $10 million to women who worked at the company in the last five years as part of a settlement in a class action lawsuit over alleged gender discrimination, according to court documents filed Monday.
, in which current and former employees described a workplace rife with sexist behavior. The suit laid out allegations that Riot fostered a “men-first” “bro culture,” where harassment and inappropriate behavior like “crotch-grabbing, phantom humping, and sending unsolicited and unwelcome pictures of male genitalia” and managers circulating a “hot girl list,” ranking female employees by attractiveness, went unchecked.
The suit also alleged that outspoken female employees faced retaliation from Riot, including “denied promotions, refusals to provide increased compensation or equal pay, demotions, reassignment with significantly different responsibilities, losses of benefits, suspensions, terminations, and other adverse employment actions.”Two employees also filed individual wrongful termination and sexual harassment suits against the company.
But in the spring of 2019, the legal battles spilled out of the courtroom and onto Riot’s West L.A. corporate campus after riot tried to force the two individual cases into arbitration. In response,The walkout marked the first mass worker action of its kind in the video game industry. Organizers said that it was inspired by the massive, which was also staged partly as a protest against the tech giant’s use of forced arbitration.
The practice, which denies employees suing their employer a full trial by moving the dispute to an arbitration process that critics say often favors the company, has faced mounting opposition in the past year. Following the Google walkout, the company agreed to do away with forced arbitration entirely. Facebook partly followed suit, saying it would stop the practice for sexual harassment cases.
Riot Games, for its part, refused to give in to the demands of its employees following their walkout in May, though it did pledge to allow new hires the option to waive the forced arbitration clause for sexual harassment and assault “once current litigation was resolved.”
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