I think you handled this pretty well, and just writing this article shows a commitment to your cause in spite of the jeopardy your job had been in. I don’t believe you should second-guess your resolve while at the company if you ended up being sent to meetings over your behavior. It was clear you pushed your job status to its limits (and beyond now). Those aren’t the tracks of a passive person against discrimination.
Sure, it’s not the most die-hard commitment — you could have made a scene the instant you noticed it in your contractual phase until you were dismissed — but I don’t think that punishing people for going 90% instead of 100% is the right way to create change. If instead everyone went just 30%, we wouldn’t have this uproar right now.
In fact, staying on and pursuing a genuine attempt at a cooperative internal effort, giving Riot the option to change in good faith without blowing up in public, is a first-line step to resolve problems. It lets people know that the effort for Riot to change has been reasonable and generous, that Riot had ample opportunity to address this before it went public, and their being burned now is justified after having refused a more reasonable approach.
I’ve actually realized while writing this that I wonder why more attention isn’t being focused on your release from Riot.
From the current available information, it appears like a Rosa Parks kind of eviction, punishing someone for standing up for the right principle in a non-violent capacity. The context of your release along with DZK invites people associate you for the same offense. However, whether or not someone agrees on the premise of PR firing an employee for antagonizing the community, you did not actually antagonize anyone as far as I saw, unless I’m simply unaware of it. Your tweet of standing by DZK seems like a very loose (or convenient) excuse to remove you, especially when it didn’t get any public attention. Essentially Riot just fired someone for standing up to sexism in the workplace in a non-aggressive manner.
The fact no one even knew of how close you had come to losing your job is evidence that you’ve tried to be a reasonable force in effecting change, trying to move Riot without burning everything around you to the ground. Your medium piece is critical of Riot, but only came after the earth had already been scorched, and was only critical on problems *Riot is responsible for*. That’s their fault the situation exists, not you for having corroborated a flaw that had already been revealed publicly.
If someone exposes an unprincipled agenda, of course it’s in Riot’s best interests to fire them, but is that something we should give Riot a pass on? You didn’t even have public attention (I’m the first comment here), so there’s no PR-management reason to fire you. Is Riot trying to send a message to other employees to silently endure pervasive sexism within the company or get fired if they corroborate it in public?
Riot announced they’d be working to change internally. People were skeptical whether this statement was genuine or merely PR to pacify the public until they forget. Right now, Reddit is celebrating the latest Kotaku article, but not thinking about the other statement Riot has quietly slipped in by firing someone who was pursuing an admirable agenda in a non-antagonistic manner. If Riot really supports change, they should own their failure — which means accepting the backlash and negative PR that comes with it — not fire someone who’s demonstrated themselves as a reasonable force for that change.
