Facebook Manager Quit After Being ‘Harassed’ Over Diversity Views

Harin - Jan 21, 2019

A Facebook engineering manager left the social media giant this month, saying she'd been harassed after criticizing the tech company's lack of diversity.

An engineering manager of Facebook left the company this month after being harassed for criticizing the social media giant’s lack of diversity.

She wrote about her reasons for departure on Workplace, the internal social network of Facebook. In her post, Alpert identifies herself as a transgender, pointed the finger at a remark from a co-worker on Workplace. She also mentioned that she was under attack on Blind, an app where employees can chat anonymously.

Her post read:

Facebook later confirmed that Alpert shared her post internally on reasons why she left.

Commenting on this, Anthony Harrison, a spokesman of the company said:

He continued saying that Facebook does not tolerate any kind of harassment and the company has explicit policies on the way people should communicate and treat others at Facebook.

When being asked, Alpert declined to give any comments.

Community manager of Blind, Curie Kim, stated that the company does not accept and allow harassment or bullying to exist on its platform. Content that doesn’t abide by the rules will be flagged and removed. Users who repeatedly get flagged are not allowed to access the app.

She said:

This is not the first time that an employee of Facebook has spoken about the company’s lack of diversity. Mark Luckie, who used to work as a strategic partner manager for global influencers, also said the firm has let their black employees as well as users down. His note was share publicly back in November. At that time, Facebook commented on this issue saying it tried its best to become a “truly inclusive company.”

Similar to other companies in the field of technology, Facebook has been struggling to create a diversity in its workforce which mostly consists of white and Asian men. Back in July, Facebook informed that approximately 4% of its US employees were black while 5% of them were Hispanic. Among the company’s US staff, 8% identified themselves as transgender people or LGBQA which is short for lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, or asexual.

2018 has been a tough year for social media giant as it went through a lot of scandals related to data security and privacy. The company also has also seen a string of departures from its executives. In December, the company dropped to No. 7 from its No.1 spot on the list of best workplaces from Glassdoor.