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Meta is facing a sex discrimination and retaliation lawsuit from a former employee claiming the company has a “toxic pattern of silencing women who identify problems.”
The claimant, Meta’s former Reality Labs Director of Product Marketing, claimed that differential treatment of women is “openly permitted.”
In the suit, the ex-director – Kelly Stonelake – claimed she was retaliated against after raising safety and compliance concerns.
The ex-employee also alleged she was sexually assaulted by a former executive earlier in her 15-year tenure at Meta, while the company was known as Facebook.
Meta has refused to comment on the lawsuit, which demands Stonelake be compensated for emotional distress, lost wages, and attorney fees.
Lawsuit accuses Meta of ‘silencing women’
According to the lawsuit, Stonelake was reportedly laid off from the tech firm in January 2024 after a period of medical leave.
She claimed she was targeted after opposing “illegal activity” and “violations of public policy” at Meta while working on the company’s ‘Horizon World’ product—a VR video game that users play using Meta’s ‘Quest’ headset.
Stonelake said she raised safety concerns in 2022, pushing for Meta to consider a “quality pause” before it rolled out the product, asserting it did not have “adequate” parental and safety controls.
The marketing director said the concerns were dismissed outright by Horizon World’s “all-male” product leadership team, claiming that her sex led to her being silenced.
The lawsuit gives the reported incident as an example of a systemic issue at Horizon World, alleging that other female employees have “reported feeling their voices were considered less valuable and that differential treatment was openly permitted.”
Stonelake claimed that after her quality, safety, and compliance concerns to the leadership team, she was excluded from subsequent weekly meetings about the product.
Ex-director demands ‘accountability’ at Meta
Speaking to Business Insider, Stonelake said she was “the only voice in a room that was otherwise all men advocating for a change.”
She called her experience an example of “discrimination in tech” on an ethical level, before arguing that a company culture like the one she described is not just bad for business but also has wider societal implications.
“It's anti-innovation, it's irresponsible, and it causes harm on a scale that only technology companies can achieve,” she said.
The former product director said she has filed the suit to keep Meta “accountable to responsible, durable business.”
“As I've gotten further and further away from Meta, it's become clearer and clearer that in order to get accountability, I need to file a lawsuit,” she said, describing it as a “long time coming.”
The case comes amid significant changes at Meta towards its stance on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and content moderation.
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Current and former employees have questioned moves to eliminate its third-party fact-checking network, loosen hateful conduct policies, and scrap DEI programs.
In a memo sent to all employees in January, Meta’s VP of Human Resources, Janelle Gale said the company is eliminating all DEI measures, including “equity and inclusion programs and changing hiring and supplier diversity practices,” attributing the move in part to a “changing” legal and policy landscape surrounding DEI in the US.
While addressing the changes to Meta’s stance on free speech on a January episode of the Joe Rogan podcast, CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for workplaces to embrace “masculine energy.”
“Masculine energy I think is good, and obviously society has plenty of that, but I think that corporate culture was really trying to get away from it,” he said. “It’s like you want feminine energy, you want masculine energy… I think that that’s all good. But I do think the corporate culture sort of had swung toward being this somewhat more neutered thing.”
Zuckerberg clarified that “you want women to be able to succeed and have companies that can unlock all the value from having great people no matter what their background or gender.”
In her interview with Business Insider, Stonelake claimed that Meta is “able to keep really good people focused on really harmful work.”
