Female executive accuses Meta of ‘silencing women’

A former executive of Meta Platforms has accused the Facebook and Instagram owner of creating a ‘toxic’ workplace for women.

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg last month said the company more ‘masculine energy’. Picture: AFP

A former executive of Meta Platforms has accused the Facebook and Instagram owner of creating a “toxic” workplace for women who raise concerns about product flaws, including issues with safety risks to children.

Kelly Stonelake, 37, is suing Meta for sexual discrimination, ­alleging that she experienced a “toxic pattern of silencing women who identify problems and protect users, then retaliating against them for doing their jobs”.

Ms Stonelake started working at the company’s headquarters in Palo Alto, California, in early 2009 and was one of the first several hundred employees at Facebook who helped build the company into a social media giant.

She worked at Meta for 15 years before leaving in January last year, by which time she was director of product marketing, including for Horizon Worlds, Meta’s virtual reality game.

In 2022, while leading Meta’s Horizon virtual reality platform expansion, Ms Stonelake claimed she identified serious product safety issues that put children at risk of immediate exposure to hate speech, sexual harassment and bullying.

She claimed there were inadequate parental controls, in violation of regulatory requirements, which meant that many children were already easily able to access the platform, even though it was marketed as for those aged 18 and over.

She said she was asked to lead on expanding Horizon to teen­agers, expanding the product ­internationally and expanding it on mobile devices such as phones and tablets.

However, Ms Stonelake said she believed the product was not ready for those steps and supported another female leader’s call for a pause on the rollout.

It is claimed that Meta’s Horizon leadership team first ordered Ms Stonelake to silence her female colleague. When she refused, she claims they excluded her from weekly leadership meetings.

Ms Stonelake said the otherwise all-male leadership team ­implemented the pause she had advocated, without acknowledgment, and branded it a “quality lockdown”, but failed to mention safety issues.

She claimed there was an ­“exodus” of female leaders from the team that was directly tied to Meta’s “hostile response to women who raised concerns about product decisions”.

By the time she went on medical leave in January 2023, she claimed she was the third of only four women who had been in leadership roles when she joined the team to take emergency leave on medical grounds. None of the women who left returned to Meta, she said.

Ms Stonelake claimed she had been subject to repeated sexual discrimination and harassment in previous years.

In her early years at Facebook, she claimed male colleagues had a bet on whether Ms Stonelake and her boyfriend would break up.

At a company-sanctioned on-campus drinking event called “League”, regularly attended by Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, Ms Stonelake claims a drunk male colleague who had been the ringleader of the bet grabbed Ms Stonelake’s crotch over her trousers.

When she reacted, the colleague allegedly called it an accident and shamed her for reacting.

In 2011, when she was 23, Ms Stonelake claimed her boss, who had recently attended her wedding, sexually assaulted her during a business trip and told her on a separate business trip that she would not be promoted unless she had sex with him. She said she moved from California to Washington to escape him.

Over the next decade, while she performed well and was recognised for exceeding expectations in her performance reviews, she claimed she experienced a pattern of offensive, sexist comments from colleagues and was held to higher standards than male colleagues by male bosses in separate organisations within Meta.

Last month Mr Zuckerberg told the Joe Rogan podcast that Meta needed more “masculine energy” and that the company’s culture had been “neutered” in ­recent years.

Meta declined to comment.

The Times