Pinterest’s $22m settlement with executive is a ‘slap in the face’, Black former workers say

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Pinterest announced this week it would pay more than $20m to settle a gender discrimination lawsuit brought by a female executive. But to two Black former employees who had previously lodged similar complaints, the settlement represents a “slap in the face”.

Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks had become public figureheads for Pinterest after spearheading widely-heralded policy changes, including adding factchecking features to vaccination content, that predated those from tech rivals like YouTube and Facebook. But internally, both former employees said, they faced pushback.

In June 2020, after quitting their jobs at Pinterest’s policy team, they went public with claims they had to fight to be paid fairly and were retaliated against for advocating for change. Ozoma also said the company failed to protect her when a colleague shared her personal information with hate sites.

Ozoma and Banks ended up leaving the company with half a year of severance pay. But their public comments laid the groundwork for other women and people of color at the company to come forward with similar experiences.

Two months after their departure , the former Pinterest COO Françoise Brougher sued the company for gender discrimination – the case that resulted in the $22m settlement this week.

Pinterest pays $20m to settle gender discrimination lawsuit

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To Jade Magnus Ogunnaike, the senior campaign director at civil rights advocacy organization Color of Change, the settlement is the latest example of a Silicon Valley company displaying inequitable treatment of its Black employees.

“It must not go unnoticed that Pinterest still has failed to so much as offer an apology or course of action for accountability to Ifeoma and Aerica – two Black women whose bravery to speak out sparked a public examination into the company’s toxic work culture that likely influenced this week’s settlement,” she said.

Banks said she and Ozoma decided to come forward in June part because Pinterest, like many companies this year, made public statements in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

“I could not stand by and let a company get away with posting Black Lives Matter when they did not act like black lives mattered in the negotiations they had just concluded with us,” Banks told the Guardian. “This was about integrity and not letting the company get away with painting themselves as this space for kindness and positivity when they had completely denigrated, abused, and retaliated against us.”

Meanwhile, the accusations from these women about work conditions at Pinterest have shaken the reputation of the tech company, which has a largely female user base and has long been seen as a “nice” alternative to the more cutthroat tech firms of Silicon Valleyand the tech-bro culture.

Brougher made her lawsuit against her former employer public in August in a blogpost titled The Pinterest Paradox: Cupcakes and Toxicity, in which she wrote that though 70% of Pinterest’s users are women, the company is “steered by men with little input from female executives.”

“Pinterest’s female executives, even at the highest levels, are marginalized, excluded and silenced,” she said.

After the initial complaints from Ozoma and Banks, a group of Pinterest shareholders filed a lawsuit against executives at the company including the CEO, Ben Silbermann, alleging they enabled a culture of discrimination. The complaint also alleged that culture of discrimination that has harmed Pinterest’s reputation and its bottom line. It alleged Silbermann failed to act on complaints.

“He repeatedly placed himself before the company, surrounding himself with yes-men and marginalizing women who dared to challenge Pinterest’s White, male leadership clique,” the suit reads. That case is set to be heard in 2021.

A spokeswoman for Pinterest said the company does not share details about specific employee situations “out of respect for the privacy of those involved”. She said Pinterest issued an independent review of its workplace culture five months ago, which concluded this week.

That board recommended Pinterest require unconscious bias training for every employee, provide more transparency and standardization around roles and their requirements to ensure diverse candidates are not under promoted, and create a centralized team to investigate workplace concerns.

We need representation in tech that reflects the actual demographics of our country

Aerica Shimizu Banks

In response to diversity concerns, the company has “added diversity” to its board of directors by promoting several people of color, and “revamped and expanded” inclusion training for employees. The company also announced a partnership with the NAACP to form an Inclusion Advisory Council.

“Pinterest is fully committed to making the changes recommended by the Special Committee of the Board,” the spokeswoman said. “We value our employees and know it’s our responsibility to build a diverse, equitable and inclusive environment for everyone at Pinterest.”

Banks said what she and Ozoma faced at Pinterest has become common for women of color in the tech industry, who are hired to increase diversity and then fired for calling out the very issues they were hired to address. She compared their experience to the controversy that emerged at Google last week when a prominent Black scientist studying the ethics of artificial intelligence said she was fired after the company attempted to suppress her research and she criticized its diversity efforts.

“This is why diversity is not enough,” Banks said. “This is why representation in tech needs to be equitable. It’s not just enough to have one person of color on a board or in the C-suite. We need representation in tech that reflects the actual demographics of our country.”

The issues facing Pinterest come at a time of renewed focus on tech companies, from their diversity problems to their economic power and lack of regulation under review. Google has faced three antitrust lawsuits in a row this fall and Facebook is facing mounting calls to be broken up.

“The era of self-regulation in the tech industry is over,” Banks said. “Now is the time for external forces to come in and manage the industry in a way the industry has refused to do for itself.”