Nintendo has the image of family-friendly gaming; however, a new report shared by Kotaku alleges that Nintendo of America is a discriminatory workplace, especially for female contractors.
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The report Kotaku shared includes interviews with ten contracted game testers who worked for Nintendo of America through the years. They claimed the contracted employees had to deal with sexual harassment and discrimination at Redmond offices. Besides the full-fledged employees, the company has outsourced many jobs for their offices. For this, the gaming giant worked with contracting companies such as Aerotek.
Over the years, the firm promoted some contractors to full-time employees; however, the insider reveals that full-time positions were given based on favoritism. A product testing lead at Nintendo of America was making inappropriate advances toward women working under him and taking that as an indication of deciding who would get promoted.
“A lot of the NOA red badges (full-time employees) had reputations for using the tester pool of associates as a dating pool. If you were approached by a red badge, and they appeared to be making moves on you, (other women said that) you didn’t want to dissuade them too hard.”
The same insider remarked that male contractors working for the company were given more opportunities to be promoted to full-time positions. The chance of getting promoted was considerably higher if they were friends with the NOA red badges.
“Your chance of being converted to full time was probably worse as a girl. It’s usually guys who get promoted. They’re usually all friends. They watch the Super Bowl together.”
In addition, another report from a different employee claims that female contractors were making $3 less an hour than their male counterparts. The gaming giant recently hired the contractors in question. The said employee only managed to negotiate her way up to $1 less.
Another report alleges that an NOA employee was using company chat to post sexually suggestive content. Later that employee got sexual harassment training; yet, he didn’t get any warnings about his behavior.
Another worker explained that as an openly gay woman, she was subjected to inappropriate comments from male co-workers whose advances she had previously rejected.
In the report, Kotaku remarks that only 10% of the game testing contractors are women at Nintendo of America.
Nintendo of America did not respond to Kotaku’s questions; still, company chief Doug Bowser internally acknowledged the media’s allegations after the labor report in April. He highlighted that the company has zero tolerance for misconduct.
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