For Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz, hiring a woman seemed like a leap of faith — it came back to bite him, for all the right reasons.
A former female executive at the augmented reality startup Magic Leap who was hired to make the company more diverse and its product more “woman friendly” is now suing for sex discrimination and misogyny.
In the bombshell lawsuit, filed this week in Southern Florida District Court, Tannen Campbell, former VP of marketing and brand identity, makes a series of damning claims against the company’s practices, some of which are so baffling they seem to have been lifted from a leaked script of Mad Men.
Campbell says she was hired by Abovitz to solve what he calls the company’s “pink/blue problem,” referring to the lack of gender diversity at the start-up and to their ongoing struggle to make a product largely designed by men for men (Magic Leap is developing a mixed-reality headset similar to Microsoft’s HoloLens) appealing to women.
A couple of months into the job, Campbell was asked to put together a deck describing the company’s gender problem and proposing solutions. However, according to the suit, it took the chief executive a total of seven months to attend the presentation — it was allegedly cancelled and rescheduled six times — and when he finally did, he showed up late and left halfway through because it was simply not amongst his “priorities.”
The lawsuit also claims that the company — one of the most secretive and highly funded start ups in Silicon Valley — is not only a hostile environment to the handful of women who work there (not a single one in leadership position and only 3 percent of engineers) but that executives are so oblivious to the depth of misogyny running in its culture that they have even failed to notice how it negatively affected its performance, including delaying product launch multiple times.
A case in point being that “all the engineers and others in predominately-male Magic Leap could conceive of to make the product female friendly was to produce a version in pink.”
The complaint also alleges that Magic Leap employees spoke internally of women as “stay at home wives” or mere “objects.”
In one incident, for instance, an internal email announcing the launch of a “Magic Leap spouses Google group” was sent around to staff with the subject line “bored wives at home while you are loving it at the Leap,” suggesting all employees were male with unemployed wives quietly waiting for them at home.
Campbell further claims that when a female employee asked IT support lead Euen Thompson a question during a new hire orientation, he responded: “Yeah, women always have trouble with computers.”
Pressed by women in the group, in apparent disbelief, to repeat himself he allegedly replied: “In IT we have a saying; stay away from the Three Os: Orientals, Old People, and Ovaries.”
If that weren’t enough, when Campbell brought the incident to upper management she didn’t hear anything back for two weeks until Chief Administrative Officer finally told her that although he understood that what Thompson had done was offensive, he could not fire Thompson because “he was African American and there were white men who had done ‘far worse’.”
“Campbell, outraged, asked, ‘Why not fire them all?’ Vlietstra answered: ‘Because we need the white guys. They’re important. We need them. I know you’re upset, but my hands are tied.’ Later, Thompson resumed giving new hire orientations” the complaint continues.
Magic Leap is what is commonly called a “unicorn” in tech lingo —a much-hyped startup valued at more than $1billion even though it still hasn’t got a product to show for itself.
Campbell says she was terminated precisely because she challenged CEO Rony Abovitz to acknowledge that it is his toxic culture of “macho bullying” that delayed the launch date of its much anticipated headset four times over the course of a year and a half. Magic Leap did not immediately return requests for comment.
A key line in the lawsuit, and perhaps the most damaging to the company, says Campbell “also raised concerns that what Magic Leap showed the public in marketing material was not what the product actually could do — admonitions ignored in favor of her male colleagues’ assertions that the images and videos presented on Magic Leap’s website and on YouTube were ‘aspirational,’ and not Magic Leap’s version of ‘alternate facts.'”
In addition to Campbell, since December 2016 Magic Leap has lost its head of brand experience, Melissa McNutt, as well as its PR chief executive Andy Fouche, capping two months of high-profile departures amid rumors that the company is struggling to live up to its unrealized ambitions. Former chief marketing officer, Brian Wallace also left in November.
A report by the Information published last month describes a huge gap between the demo shown to investors, journalist and partners — promising a headset that would create realistic virtual objects and import them into a viewer’s field of vision, e.g: a life-sized whale jumping out of an artificial ocean on a gymnasium floor— and the reality of their product.
Perhaps it’s not that surprising coming from a “mixed reality” company.
