Hong Perez, a former sales executive at Spotify, has filed a lawsuit against the company, claiming the sales department discriminates against women.
According to the lawsuit, Head of U.S. Sales Brian Berner took male employees to the Sundance Film Festival in 2016 and 2017 and excluded female employees who were better qualified.
“These trips were referred to internally by employees as Berner’s ‘boys’ trips.’ Spotify employees spoke of drug use by the ‘boys’ at each trip. In addition, one of the male Spotify employees became involved in a physical altercation on one of the trips,” the lawsuit claims. “Yet, in stark contrast to how he would later act concerning a purported Code of Conduct violation by a woman, Berner took no action to investigate or discipline these men.”
The lawsuit mentions other instances of gender discrimination, including a male managers trip to an Atlantic City strip club and a male employee who got promoted after a sexual harassment allegation.
Perez said that she became a scapegoat in the company “to protect Berner when a contract process under his leadership came under scrutiny due to his procurement of concert tickets from a party to the contract during contract negotiations.” Perez was soon terminated from Spotify.
Perez is looking for economic damages for lost wages and benefits and damages for emotional distress and humiliation.
Spotify provided a comment regarding the lawsuit:
“At Spotify, we do not tolerate discrimination of any kind at any level. While we cannot comment on the specific details of a pending litigation, these claims are without merit.”
This certainly isn’t the first time a company has been accused of gender discrimination. Last year, three former employees of Google filed a lawsuit against the company over alleged gender bias.
The women claimed in the lawsuit that during their time at Google, the company “discriminated and continues to discriminate against its female employees by paying female employees less than male employees with similar skills, experience, and duties.”
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