Earlier Pinterest COO files lawsuits alleging discrimination


Illustration for article titled Pinterest Former COO Dismissed for Calling for Sexism, Lawsuits

Photo: Spencer Platt (Getty Images)

Pinterest might be known as a platform that gives to our nation mother en knit en makeup artist, but behind the scenes, the company may not be the one woman-friendly environment you would imagine.

That is according to a new lawsuit submitted against Pinterest yesterday by the company’s former COO, Francoise Brougher, who abruptly stepped down of the multibillion-dollars platform in April with not much explanation to a two-year stint at the helm of Pinterest. Now she claims she has been hit by dismissal after she complained about gender discrimination and inequality in salary during the top measurement of the company.

“Although 70 percent of Pinterest users are women, the company is run by men with little input from female executives,” Brougher wrote in a Average post that went the same day as the pack. “Pinterest’s women managers, even at the highest level, are marginalized, excluded and silent. I know it, until I was the main feature of Pinterest until my fire in April. ”

The lawsuit, which the Verge team assisted over here, is nothing short of damn. In it, Brougher claims that he is helping the company in raising them IPO of 2019, she learned that they are not nearly paid as much as some of the men on staff who were technically under them – and moreover, their business afforded at a much slower rate than some of her male peers got it at the time. When she began asking questions about these inequalities – and other strategic decisions made within the company – she was criticized for not being “cooperative”. When she later complained to Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann about the company’s sexist work environment, she got fired over a video call.

Brougher’s blog post goes deeper into the alleged infringements:

Ben appeared to listen to only a few people and sealed himself from opposing views. Ben’s “in group”, the men invited to the “meeting after the meeting”, had all the power and influence. This structure was detrimental to Pinterest’s culture, speed and results. The senior management team was torn apart by backstabbing and gossip as executives competed for Ben’s attention. A colleague once remarked, “the only way we do things here is to hide things.”

Brougher admits that during her tenure she was told she was “too loud”, “too sincere,” and, strangely enough, “too transparent” about the problems the company ran its public offering. An example she gave was that Pinterest’s revenue projections after the IPO were short of what her team projected – and it turns out that it boils down to a slight adjustment of the ad targeting model whose team was not told. “I had instructed the product and engineering teams for better communication,” she wrote, “but discussions about the issue had taken place in ad hoc meetings from which I was excluded.”

When asked for more transparency – and pointed out that the ad targeting system was not up to par with Pinterest’s competitors – Silbermann do not exclude them alone those ad-hoc meetings, but “also all product team meetings”.

“I naively thought I had broken the glass ceiling,” she wrote. “But even as COO of a major Silicon Valley company, I was expected to act in a certain way and be depressed for men because I am a woman.”

We reached out to Pinterest for comment on the lawsuit over the alleged boardroom Sexual behavior “in love”. A spokeswoman told the New York Times that “our staff is incredibly important to us,” and that it was “conducting an independent review of its culture, policies, and practices.” Hopefully the higher-ups take that review to heart.

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