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Days after an awkward, clunky backpack was outed as being an early prototype of the tech wunderkind Magic Leap, the augmented reality startup is being sued for sexual discrimination by a former female executive. Not a great run of publicity, particularly when the startup is due to present its tech to board members this week, according to reports in Business Insider.
Tannen Campbell, Magic Leap’sformer VP of strategic marketing and brand identity, alleges that a hostile work environment was created by a series of incidents listed in the suit, including an IT support lead telling a group during a tutorial that women have trouble with computers and: “In IT we have a saying; stay away from the Three Os: Orientals, Old People and Ovaries.” The suit alleges, “Magic Leap was run by Abovitz sycophants”, “Magic Leap tolerated sexist comments and attitudes,” and “Magic Leap kept women in their place”, with each statement backed up with a list of examples.
Read more: Inside Magic Leap, the startup creating a new type of reality
Incredibly, Campbell was brought on board to help tackle a gender diversity problem at the startup, famously valued at $4.5 billion despite the product still being in development. Campbell claims a presentation she was asked to put together on the issue was cancelled multiple times, and when it finally took place after seven months, CEO Rony Abovitz walked out halfway through. She was also part of a “female brain trust initiative” where ideas were floated for making the device and the company more female-friendly. According to the suit, the only solution the engineers at Magic Leap could come up with to tackle the issue prior to Campbell’s hiring, was to produce a pink prototype of the device. However after one “chaotic” meeting no proposed changes were implemented, and no male executives attended the group again.
The suit refers to the environment as one of “macho bullying”, and claims that Magic Leap is losing “competitive advantage to products like Microsoft’s Hololens”, because it fails to hire women. “Microsoft, which employs far more females on its team, developed its similar product on a faster timeline with more content that appeals to both genders.” Magic Leap, by comparison, continues to delay the launch, the suit says.
It ultimately alleges Campbell was fired because she: “challenged Magic Leap’s CEO, Rony Abovitz, to acknowledge the depths of misogyny in Magic Leap’s culture and take steps to correct a gender imbalance that negatively affects the company’s core culture and renders it so dysfunctional it continues to delay the launch of a product that attracted billions of investment dollars.”
Although CEO Abovitz cleared up last week’s leaked photo shortly after it was released - claiming on Twitter: “The photo shows a @magicleap R&D test rig where we collect room/space data for our machine vision/machine learning work” - Campbell’s suit now attacks the very promise of Magic Leap.
Incredible and hyperreal images of whales floating over crowds and elephants cupped in the palm of the hand have become ubiquitous with the AR headset and its potential. But the suit alleges: “Campbell raised concerns that what Magic Leap showed the public in marketing material was not what the product actually could do - admonitions ignored in favor of her male colleagues’ assertions that the images and videos presented on Magic Leap’s website and on YouTube were ‘aspirational,’ and not Magic Leap’s version of ‘alternate facts’."
The marketing material is designed to show off its potential, to garner attention and investment, which it did, in spades. The startup has raised $1.39 billion dollars and backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Google, JPMorgan and Alibaba.
But with an increasingly critical eye on the unicorn, particularly after a December report by the Information that claimed the device may not be able to be miniaturised enough, the suit will come as a blow.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
