Activision to pay US$50M to settle workplace discrimination lawsuit
Activision Blizzard pays roughly US$50 million to settle a 2021 lawsuit by a California regulator that alleged the online game maker discriminated in opposition to ladies staff, together with denying them promotion alternatives and underpaying them.
California’s Civil Rights Department (CRD) had sued the “Call of Duty” maker after two years of investigation over allegations that it routinely underpaid and failed to advertise feminine staff and condoned sexual harassment.
The CRD will withdraw the allegations of systemic sexual harassment, in keeping with the settlement settlement, seen by Reuters. The remaining allegations resolved by the settlement included that Activision discriminated in opposition to ladies, together with by denying promotion alternatives and paying them lower than males for doing considerably comparable work, the CRD mentioned in a press release on Friday.
Activision will take further steps to make sure truthful pay and promotion practices and supply financial aid to ladies who had been staff or contract employees in California between Oct. 12, 2015, and Dec. 31, 2020, as a part of the settlement, which is topic to court docket approval, the CRD assertion mentioned.
“In the settlement agreement, the CRD expressly acknowledged that ‘no court or independent investigation has substantiated any allegations that there has been systemic or widespread sexual harassment at Activision Blizzard,'” the online game maker mentioned in a press release on Friday.
The firm additionally mentioned that no investigation substantiated that its board or chief govt acted improperly in dealing with cases of office misconduct.
Activision, which was purchased in October by Microsoft for practically US$69 billion, agreed in 2021 to pay as much as US$18 million to settle comparable claims made by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
(Reporting by Arsheeya Bajwa in Bengaluru and Daniel Wiessner in Albany, N.Y.; Editing by Sayantani Ghosh, Grant McCool, Leslie Adler and William Mallard)
