Yahoo Finance Entertainment giant Sony in the mother of all rows over sexism
Entertainment giant Sony usually likes to make a lot of noise about what it does. It’s the film-maker behind hits including Spider-Man. Its music division’s acts stretch from Beyoncé to George Ezra. Its Playstation is the “ultimate home entertainment centre”.
But insiders at its UK offices claim there’s one thing Sony doesn’t like to talk about: the Japanese firm’s treatment of female executives here.
The allegations come from insiders working at different branches of Sony UK’s empire who claim “you have to navigate a boys’ club culture”.
One (male) senior manager at one of Sony’s biggest offices in the UK told the Standard about a “discriminatory” hiring policy where departmental budgets are cut to pay for maternity leave. That means, in his words, that “at Sony, it’s easier to hire men”.
The insider, who has over a decade of management experience at multinationals, claimed that when a member of his team went on maternity leave, he was told the cost to pay for her cover would come from his staffing budget.
“No extra money is made available — as it normally is, and has been at every major firm I’ve worked for previously — so to meet my targets I had to make significant cuts elsewhere.
“Covering the cost of just one woman’s maternity leave becomes really onerous.”
He adds: “This would never sway my hiring decisions but others might opt for not hiring women of a certain age because of Sony’s HR policy. If you’ve got two equally good candidates, one male and one female, are you going to go with the man because you then won’t potentially face this problem?”
The insider says he raised the issue three times with HR and board-level managers, “but I was told ‘it’s difficult to change things at Sony’”.
The policy is also a source of tension within teams, because the source says expenses such as travel and training have to be slashed to accommodate someone on maternity leave.
A female Sony executive, who recently left, alleged one of her managers had “said that he did not want another female colleague to go for a senior position in his team because she was a mother, as this was where her priorities were, and that she might have a second baby”.
Joeli Brearley, founder of Pregnant Then Screwed, which campaigns against maternity discrimination, says: “Hiring practices across the board are skewed to encourage people to recruit men rather than women,” she says.
“Some create a budgeting system, which means that employers save money by hiring men. Other employers decide to save money and don’t recruit a replacement for the mum on leave, instead they distribute the work to current employees. This creates animosity that is directed at women, rather than the employer.
“A third of employers actively discriminate against women of child-bearing age in the recruitment process.”
Sony refused to comment on its maternity pay policies but says it “embraces diversity and the working contributions of women”, and provides “opportunities for career development and assisting the professional growth of women”.
In Japan, the company says it has set a target for women to hold 10% of management roles in the Sony Group. But each insider spoken to by the Standard said it was “a talking point how very few women are in management roles”.
Sony Europe’s pay gap report for 2018 showed men occupy almost 80% of the highest-paid jobs at the firm. Men earn, on average, 24% more than women. One ex-employee claimed she was told their manager “was frustrated that myself and another colleague had fallen pregnant at the same time”.
Other women said they had signed non-disclosure agreements and left Sony after struggling at the firm when returning from maternity leave. They said they are afraid to tell their stories for fear of court action.
Another executive, who worked at Sony for five years before leaving for a rival US tech household name, said: “I never really saw myself as different to my male colleagues until after I became a mother and went back to work at Sony. I would progress in terms of my business impact, but this was never reflected in title, recognition or team growth. Male colleagues at a lower grade than me were treated very differently.
“After I came back from maternity leave, my role had been reduced significantly, and I was overlooked in team meetings. The contractor who’d been hired to cover my leave was earning £10,000 a year more than me, despite the fact that I had more experience both within and outside of the company.
“In the end, I raised a grievance, and eventually left.”
Her departure and that of others cast a bitterly ironic shadow on the corporate giant’s slogan: Be Moved.
