A group of former employees at the commercial rocket company are coming forward to say that there is a culture of sexual harassment in the workplace and that managers and the human resources department mishandled complaints poorly.
The individuals are speaking out in light of an essay published by one former employee. Kosak details multiple instances of being groped and feeling uncomfortable after she fought off sexual advances from her male co-workers. Four more people spoke with The Verge and described their own troubling experiences. In three of the cases reviewed, the employees felt that the responses from the HR were inadequate.
One former employee said that she felt that the lack of action against individuals who committed acts of sexual harassment was driven by management's desire to avoid work disruptions.
Kosak decided to come forward publicly with her story in order to help others in the space industry realize that harassment should not be condoned. Kosak says until someone finally says, "This is unacceptable," you find a way to mentally accept that it's okay. I hope that the essay helps bring to light some of the behaviors that are happening out there. Lioness is a platform for people to report workplace malfeasance.
The company is reluctant to hold men accountable for bad behavior, according to the former employees.
In the essay, Kosak claims that a colleague grabbed her butt when she first started at the company and that another colleague ran his hand over her chest during a team bonding event. She claims that men from the company would call her at night and make sexual advances towards her. One colleague tried to touch her multiple times despite her pleas to stay professional. Kosak says she reported all of these incidents to her superiors or to HR, but people rarely followed up on her complaints.
Kosak says she witnessed other women dealing with similar issues. Kosak wrote that some of the men who work at SpaceX hug women without consent, stare at women while they work, and interpret every social encounter as an opportunity to date women in the office.
Four people who used to work for the company, all of whom claimed to have experienced similar types of treatment or witnessed other women dealing with harassment at the company, were interviewed by The Verge. One former employee said that they were part of a very small group of women and non-binary people working at the company. That made them feel like they were outnumbered. The company is reluctant to hold some men accountable for bad behavior if they have contributed a lot to the company, according to the former employees.
A woman who used to work as an intern at the company, Julia CrowleyFarenga, filed a lawsuit against the company in 2020, claiming that a manager retaliated against her after she reported harassment from one of her other managers.
Four women and a non-binary person in my room were harassed during our internship.
A woman who asked to remain anonymous for fear of repercussions described an instance when a senior technician tried to get into her room in internship housing while he was drunk. A male co-worker made inappropriate comments about another person's appearance and other people experienced the same behavior. A person tells The Verge that all four of the women in their room were harassed during their internship. That experience was really upsetting.
The company did not respond to a request for details about its sexual harassment policy. After Lioness reached out to the company about Kosak's essay, Gwynne Shotwell, president and COO of the company, sent a company-wide email reminding them of the company's "no A-hole" policy. She encouraged people to report harassment.
Shotwell wrote in the email that it was important to report harassment quickly, as we can't fix what we don't know. If you experience harassment or discrimination, report it to your manager or any HR representative.
The email claims that the company will be looking at its HR practices. Shotwell wrote in the email that they know they can always do better. HR is soliciting feedback from groups across the company to ensure the process is effective. HR will conduct an internal audit.
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Kosak said in her essay that she met with HR on a few occasions but that no action was taken. She said she presented HR with a framework for addressing sexual harassment that told people how to report it and what consequences they would face if they did not. There was no follow-up on her proposal.
In October, she submitted an anonymous tip to the company's Ethics and Compliance tip line. She provided a copy of her tip to The Verge.
I am reaching out to you because the HR department has done nothing to resolve these issues, and in some cases engineering leaders have come together to bring to HR the list of changes necessary, they forced us to work for over 10 hours. I was harassed after that. These people were promoted.
Kosak was revealed by the submission document for the tip. Kosak says she was confronted by HR about the allegations in the tip. Kosak recorded the call in which she was asked if she knew who submitted the tip or not. She was asked to come up with solutions.
Women who have worked despite the many blockades on the path to joining this company are called too ambitious.
Kosak spoke with a supervisor who set her up with a meeting with Shotwell and the company's head of HR. Kosak says that Shotwell and Bjelde asked her to propose solutions to fix the harassment reporting process at SpaceX. She suggested a third-party investigation in an email.
Kosak had a follow-up call with HR after the meeting, in which she was asked to detail her allegations again, and again, she asked for ideas on how to fix the harassment reporting process. She suggested that there be a matrix of repercussions for harassing behavior, which the HR representatives seemed reluctant to implement, suggesting that this information was too private to discuss openly in the company.
Kosak had presented a plan to upper management before. She had presented her own plan to Musk, detailing how to make the company carbon neutral. Kosak claims that Musk dismissed the idea, saying that he relies on wind and solar energy. Kosak presented the Starlink team with an environmental compliance initiative that was deemed too ambitious by the people she presented it to.
Kosak wrote to Shotwell that men are allowed to get promoted despite disrespect for their authority. Women who have worked despite the many blockades on the path to joining this company are called too ambitious. On the day before Kosak wrote his essay, Musk said that his company would capture carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and turn it into rocket fuel.
Kosak took a leave of absence in November due to the stress at work and then quit 10 days later. During her leave, she received two phone calls from HR. She didn't answer the calls.
The experiences of Kosak and the female intern who dealt with a technician trying to enter her locked room are similar. A bunch of drunk technicians showed up at the house she was staying in near one of the launch sites, according to the former intern. The house was provided for interns. She says a drunk technician tried to enter her room multiple times, asking if she was naked because she had just gotten out of the shower. She says the technician made lewd comments about women and her appearance when he tried to hug her. She hid behind her couch because she was afraid he would follow her up there.
If female employees are negatively impacted and their work suffers, that is too bad because this guy is really good.
The former intern said that an HR manager reached out to her after the incident. She says that the HR manager heard about the incident from another person. The technician confronted the intern at work after the meeting with HR, telling her he was just teasing her. He told her that he was worried about losing his job. She was afraid that she would not be hired on a permanent basis for speaking out, so she continued working with the technician.
After leaving the launch site where she worked, she reported all the details to HR. The HR manager wouldn't let her know what actions had been taken because of confidentiality and the fact that she was previously unwilling to cooperate with their initial investigation. The company made one change to internship housing guidelines, and that employees of different genders would not share bathroom facilities. She did not get a job offer, but continued to work at the company.
Even though she was reluctant to speak about her harassment, she felt retaliated against even though she had filed a lawsuit. She alleged that her manager would comment that she was talking to too many men, even though she was one of the few women on the team, and that she should be careful about who she spoke to, to avoid getting the wrong impression about her. He spent more time with her during one-on-one meetings than her male colleagues. She was moved to another team after she reported his behavior, but soon started getting bad reviews. After her internship ended, she learned that the person she reported the harassment to wouldn't hire her.
According to Farenga, work culture is more important than work culture. If female employees are negatively impacted and their work suffers, that is too bad because this guy is really good.
The third former intern who spoke with The Verge said that they received a response from HR after a co-worker made an inappropriate comment to them over email. They saw a lot of people dealing with inappropriate behavior from co-workers. The former employee shared a cubicle with a man who would joke about putting porn on their shared TV and who made uncomfortable abortion jokes. A female roommate of the employee switched teams because of a team member's advances.
The problem with the company's culture that devalues individual workers is what led to the failure to adequately address inappropriate behavior in the workplace. All of them believed that culture came from upper management, notably from Musk. Kosak believes that Musk uses engineers as a resource to be mined rather than a team to be led. Everyone at the company says that everyone is dedicated to the mission of exploring space, and that there is high levels of burnout at the company. Even if an employee is reporting harassment, they argue that any distraction from that mission is something to eliminate.
They see it as a factor in why women leave the field of aviation and why the field is still dominated by men. The former employees hope to encourage other women to speak up by sharing their stories. Lioness is auctioning an NFT to raise money for bringing more workplace harassment stories in the space industry and other fields to light.
The employees hope that women will feel safe in the field someday. The goal is for women in the field to be happy in the field and stay for decades and decades and contribute just like men do without being pushed out by issues that don't get responded to. I want them to be able to reach their full potential, which is what is not happening because of men.
