Lawsuit filed against Pokemon GO dev Niantic for “systemic sexual bias”

2023 has been a very bad year for Niantic. The company has been under fire for their changes to remote raids in Pokemon GO, they recently laid off 230 employees, and the mobile game has been dealing with all sorts of bugs and issues. That said, their woes are far from over, because there’s now a lawsuit filed against them.

The lawsuit, which is seeking a class-action status, was filed by an anonymous Asian female that used to work for Niantic for a few years before they became one of the employees that were recently laid off. The employee is accusing the company of devaluing the work of its female employees and women of color. Not only that, but they accuse Niantic of denying their female employees and women of color equal pay.

The employee says that, despite having a $84,000 salary by the end of the year, she found out in “approximately” 2021 that a male colleague of hers was being paid more money, even though she had more responsibilities and a higher job title than him. By the time she had been laid off, this was still a problem. Her male colleague was being paid $127,000 per year as early as 2022, and she received a raise in spring 2023 which resulted in her making $115,000 per year. To make matters worse, the female employee discovered that Niantic had posted an average pay range for her job title and level, and she saw that she was being paid more than $10,000 less than the bottom end of that range.

The employee claims that she discussed her concerns with other female employees, and sexism and equal pay were brought up in Wolfpack, Niantic’s employee resources group for women. The female employee also went to Niantic’s Diversity Equity and Inclusion Director and Principal People Partner to voice her concerns, only for both to “make clear” that “they and male upper management at Niantic were hostile to her complaints or voiced concerns about sexism or sexual bias in the workplace”. In this same meeting, there were also executives there, and the female employee says that they told her that it was because of her speaking up about the matter to her colleagues that her job evaluations were being affected and she was being paid below the rang. The female employee says that they then “immediately unsubscribed” from the Wolfpack group becuase she feared that “her association with Wolfpack would disadvantage Wolfpack employees or her”.

Lastly, the female employee mentions in the lawsuit that upper management was informed of a Wolfpack survey. In the survey, Wolfpack found that “many female employees viewed Niantic as a sexist work culture that disadvantages female employees”. Not only that, but a majority of respondents “expressed concerns about equal pay at Niantic”. After they were informed of the survey’s findings, the employee says in the lawsuit that “Niantic’s Chief Marketing Officer, Mike Quigley, required Wolfpack to remove references to Boys Club and similar comments about sexism in the workplace from their presentation to Wolfpack members about the results of the survey”. Wolfpack was them told that they couldn’t survey staffers without approval from upper management. Overall, the complaint accuses Niantic of creating a “boys club”. The Verge reached out to Niantic for a comment, but they received no immediate response.

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