Good morning! Former TaskRabbit CEO raises Cherryrock Capital’s first fund, X pressures Interpublic to increase client spending, and Fortune’s Lila MacLellan reports on a former Meta marketing director filing a lawsuit about gender bias at the company.
- Taking on Meta. When Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, found himself under attack last month over comments about “masculine energy” and reported remarks about his former COO Sheryl Sandberg, several senior women at the company came to his defense, posting messages of support on Threads. Naomi Gleit, head of product, for example, wrote: “I am here today because Meta and Mark have been a champion of women and anyone of any background who brings excellence and grit.”
Kelly Stonelake, a former Meta marketing director who is now suing her ex-employer for sexual discrimination and retaliation, wasn’t surprised by the posts. “You can have a reality where one senior woman has a positive experience,” she told me, “and another sees an organization where you can't sustain a career at any level as a woman when you're bringing bad news to men.”
Since Stonelake filed her lawsuit, however, she says she has heard from several women at the company who say her depiction of Meta’s corporate culture resonated with them. In particular, Stonelake’s assertion that she and other women were silenced at the company when they tried to raise red flags about allegedly biased managers and purported product safety issues in Meta’s VR platform struck a chord, she told me. “I’ve sent them all to my lawyers,” Stonelake said of the women who got in touch.
In a new feature, I describe Stonelake’s key claims against the company, which include allegations of sexual assault on a business trip, several sexist comments, and her own missed promotions despite stellar performance reviews, according to her complaint. After 15 years at the company, she eventually ended up on extended medical leave because of declining mental health, her court document states, during which time she was laid off. (Meta declined to comment on the lawsuit.)
Stonelake didn’t plan to have her lawsuit drop just as Meta was pivoting away from DEI, disbanding its DEI team and dropping other diversity initiatives, but the timing has brought extra attention to her story. (To be sure, in a townhall, Zuckerberg reportedly reassured employees, "We continue to believe that diversity is a strength.”) I asked Stonelake whether her experience shows that, as some now argue, corporate DEI programs have not worked. “It's going to be an uphill battle, as you're trying to create equity and inclusion and representation in an environment where it doesn't exist,” she replied, “but it being hard and it not working are fundamentally different things, and that's a distinction I think we need to get clearer on.”
Stonelake also said she now feels embarrassed by how much she trusted the company’s leaders when they talked about creating equal opportunity for all at Meta. “I took them literally,” Stonelake says, and she thinks other employees did too. Now she’s hoping her lawsuit will help bring about changes for women at the company, while alerting the wider world to the hazards that come with making it difficult for women and others from underrepresented groups to speak up as part of their jobs.
Ultimately, that type of corporate environment creates blind spots and puts a company’s customers at risk, she says, “especially those most vulnerable who need the most protection.”
Read my story here.
Lila MacLellan
lila.maclellan@fortune.com
Signal: LilaMM.38
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