It is probably not good to work at Paradox Interactive. Like many companies in the video game industry (such as Blizzard or Ubisoft), the Swedish publisher specializing in strategy games is in turn targeted by accusations of harassment within its teams.
This is in any case what seems to reveal a survey conducted by the unions directly with the employees of the studio.
Read also:Ubisoft Employees Release Open Letter In Support Of Activision Blizzard Strikers
Incessant discrimination
History sadly seems to repeat itself every week… The latest concerns Paradox Interactive, a company well known to players for its licenses such as Crusader Kings, Killing Floor and Cities Skyline. Based on an article published by Breakit, the GamesIndustry.biz site tells us that of the studio's 133 employees, less than half believe they have been subjected to "mistreatment". This concerns 69% of women and 33% of men questioned during this survey orchestrated by the unions.
The results show that, in most cases, it is a question of acts related to intimidation and discrimination related to the sex of the person concerned. And once again, women are particularly affected. To make matters worse, a kind of “culture of silence” seems to be in order since the testimonies explain that “the aggressors are protected” by the management.
Read also:Paradox Interactive CEO quits over 'strategic differences'
A second, more in-depth investigation will soon be launched.
After being informed of the conclusions of this survey, the management of Paradox Interactive announces that it wants to take measures in order to improve things. For this, a second survey will be conducted by the publisher with all its employees in order to collect as many testimonies as possible. Last week, the company's former CEO, Ebba Ljungerud, quit his post due to "strategic differences", according to the official press release. According to the new boss of the firm, this departure would not be linked to the results of the investigation.
This Monday, Paradox spoke in the columns of the Eurogamer site.
“We are aware of the investigation carried out within the company on this subject and the results which are obviously not satisfactory. The management team want to ensure that this data is followed, but acting immediately and directly is legally difficult due to the informal nature of the survey (and the sharing of results took place just before the change of CEO, which was quite a busy time for us) We are currently working to reconcile the survey informal with our own in-house research and actions."
“Paradox is now in the process of engaging an external, neutral firm to perform an in-depth audit of our processes as well as a comprehensive employee survey. This will help us optimize our efforts on all the topics we wanted to improve these recent times/years. i.e. harassment and abuse but we will also look at topics such as terms of employment, unbiased compensation, ongoing bias awareness, inclusion, etc."
These cases of harassment and discrimination based on the gender of employees should therefore be dealt with by Paradox in the near future.
