“We’re willing to fully cooperate with the state government. Sexual harassment and discrimination isn’t tolerated at this company and we will root out any sources of it and remove them expeditiously”
But I think admitting guilt might not be a good move either way. My question was a bad one anyway since it'd be hard to know if any response would be well perceived.
And? Every large company has sexual harassment to some degree. It's all a matter of whether the company actually responds to it. Saying the accusations are a sham looks much worse then saying you'll investigate.
Some details of the case are a grab bag (I'm not sure I see how "male employees proudly came into work hungover" is an incident of sexual harassment), but there are multiple accusations here that are both far beyond the "every large company" level and clearly implicate senior leadership. They probably should have been less... toxic about it, but a good response can only go so far if the underlying incidents are true. Personally, if I worked for Blizzard, anything other than a vehement denial would have sent me right out the door.
That's not to rule out the possibility that it was just a panicked response nobody thought through in detail, since there's gotta be a big overlap between people responsible for this message and people responsible for stopping sexual harassment.
"male employees proudly came into work hungover" is an incident of sexual harassment when a female employee who did the same thing would be subject to discipline or termination. The men are excused with "well boys will be boys" or "no harm, no foul".
I worked at Blizzard for 6 years and I assure that the female employees in my team drank just as much (and in some cases more) than the male employees and there was no discipline for either men or women.
"We won't comment on ongoing litigation. We are conducting an internal investigation. We will discipline anyone who violated our code of conduct. We are committed to being an inclusive and equitable workplace."
