Story at a glance
- Lawsuits filed against Amazon over the summer detail a company culture rife with sexism, racism, and homophobia.
- The suits underscore the challenges women in tech face at the bottom and top of the corporate ladder, but men have also pushed back against discrimination at Amazon.
- An internal petition signed by AWS employees over the summer called for an independent investigation into the company to be completed by November. An investigation is ongoing, but a date for its completion is still up in the air.
Cindy Warner worked at Amazon Web Services (AWS) for little more than a year, but she remembers it as one of the most “toxic” workplace environments she has ever been exposed to.
Warner, 59, a tech executive with 30 years of experience, said she faced pay discrimination and that sexism and homophobia were baked into the company’s culture. She sued the cloud computing company earlier this year, alleging that white male executives subjected her to verbal and gender discrimination.
Warner, who is gay, claims she was fired soon after the lawsuit.
“I truly would not want my worst enemy to work at Amazon,” she told The Guardian this week. She said she was targeted for mentoring women and participating in efforts to increase company diversity and inclusion.
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Warner’s lawsuit is one of several that were filed against Amazon in May, and the suits of four other women also cite racial and gender discrimination. Each of the women, who worked in either corporate positions or warehouse management, said they faced retaliation by their white managers for complaining about sexual harassment or discrimination.
In one of the suits, Pearl Thomas, 64, a Black human resources partner, said her white male supervisor called her the “n-word.” In another, Diana Cuervo, 40, a Latina warehouse manager, alleged her white male supervisor made repeated racist remarks, including “Latins suck” and “You are a Latina woman, I need to be careful every time I talk to you.”
Emily Sousa, 23, a shift manager at Amazon’s facility in Harleysville, Pa., claimed in her suit that she was sexually and racially harassed by a male manager. Sousa, who is Asian American, said she was demoted by three levels after rejecting his advances for months.
The lawsuits illustrate the challenges women face at both the bottom and top of the tech industry and detail a pervasive culture of discrimination and inequity at Amazon.
Even some men have launched attacks on the company, and a 2020 LinkedIn blog post by former AWS employee Laudon Williams titled “Why I left Amazon” outlines multiple instances of discrimination.
“I’ve never quite had an experience like my time at AWS, and I feel it warrants a cautionary tale to inform others,” Williams wrote. He claimed he had “personally heard” an executive-level employee using homophobic language and had seen other people in power there “poison the well” to prevent employees looking at other internal roles from moving on.
These complaints were part of an internal petition at AWS signed by more than 500 employees in July demanding there be an independent investigation completed by November, the Washington Post reported.
In response, AWS chief executive Adam Selipsky confirmed to the petition’s authors that the company would investigate the claims using outside counsel, but did not commit to the November deadline.
An Amazon spokesperson told The Guardian this week that the investigation is ongoing and a date for its completion has not yet been confirmed.
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