Six months after promising a revamp to company culture, Riot Games has put out an extensive update detailing what its diversity and inclusion efforts have done so far. Riot has also announced that Angela Roseboro will join the company as chief diversity officer – a position similar to one she’s held at companies like Dropbox.
Efforts aimed at fixing the studio’s sexist culture are detailed on the company’s official site, though as you might expect they’re not incredibly specific. Riot has expanded internal teams focused on diversity, made anti-bias and anti-harassment training mandatory for all employees (some 12,000 hours of training, the company boasts), and is in the process of refining recruitment to approach more diverse potential new hires.
More concretely, Riot has brought in third-party consultants to evaluate the initiative. The company says it has “investigated dozens of new claims, conducted hundreds of interviews, and took appropriate action in each case, including cutting ties with Rioters at almost all levels of the company where appropriate.” One of the few publicly noted actions occurred in December, when Riot suspended COO Scott Gelb without pay for two months.
Some employees, speaking anonymously to Kotaku, believe that’s not enough given repeated allegations of sexual harassment including inappropriate touching which involved Gelb.
Whether Riot’s efforts at improving after extensive allegations of harassment and inappropriate behaviour will bear fruit remain to be seen, and a set of blog posts won’t tell the full story. It is, at least, good to see the company continue to publicly address the situation well after the broad outcry has settled down.