Snap Inc. has reached a settlement and paid additional severance benefits to three female employees who claimed last year’s layoffs disproportionately targeted women, according to The Wall Street Journal.
A Snap spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal that the layoffs “impacted both men and women” and “the decisions we made when determining the people impacted had absolutely nothing to do with gender.”
However, CNBC reported that one round of job cuts only laid off women from Snap’s growth and design team. This team worked closely with Snap’s CEO Evan Spiegel and “top lieutenants,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
This isn’t the first time Snap has come under fire from female employees. As noted by Gizmodo, after the May layoffs, Cheddar published an email written by former Snap software engineer Shannon Lubetich. In it, she described a “pervading sexist vibe” and told Cheddar that she’d been “unhappy and frustrated with the internal response to me bringing any issues to HR.”
Snap maintains that 70 percent of the people laid off were men. However, as pointed out by The Verge, Snap also doesn’t publish diversity records that would let people know how many women work at the company in comparison to men.
Although there’s no way to know if that 30 percent was still a disproportionate number, Snap told Cheddar that women only held 13 percent of its technology roles.
According to CNBC, Snap said it’s trying to improve since the layoffs. A spokesperson told the outlet they’ve now implemented standardized performance reviews and employees have to partake in unconscious bias training.
