A group of Microsoft employees appeared at an employee meeting with CEO Satya Nadella Thursday to protest the company’s treatment of women. The protesters asked Nadella to address claims of discrimination against women in promotion and advancement, as well as claims of sexual harassment, raised as part of a widespread discussion that has been building steam on internal company forums for the past two weeks.

Roughly 100 to 150 employees attended the Q&A in person, others watched via livestream. It’s not clear how many were part of the protest, but some female and male employees at the event wore all white, inspired by the congresswomen who wore suffragette white to the State of the Union in February. In response to the concerns, Nadella was empathetic and expressed his sadness and disappointment. He and chief people officer Kathleen Hogan promised employees additional transparency around advancement within Microsoft, according to a Microsoft employee who attended the meeting.

The catalyst for the online discussion and subsequent protest was an email posted to a distribution list for female employees in late March, according to copies of the discussion viewed by WIRED. The email was written by a woman distraught that she had hit a brick wall after years of trying to gain a promotion, despite the support of her manager, her manager’s manager, and colleagues. “The boy’s club won out on all fronts,” the woman wrote, according to the emails viewed by WIRED.

Hundreds of responses followed, with women sharing guidance, showing support, and detailing their own experiences with alleged discrimination and claims of harassment, which were first reported by Quartz.

In the online discussion, one woman who worked in engineering said that a man who worked for a partner company threatened to kill her during a business trip several years ago if she did not perform an unnamed sexual act. The woman wrote that she was able to get away. She immediately alerted human resources and management, but her male manager allegedly said that it sounded like the man was flirting and that she should get over it. When she asked to be reassigned to avoid traveling with the alleged harasser, she claims her manager reframed her request as an inability to perform her role, and she was told she had 60 days to find a new role or be laid off, which prompted her to move from engineering to operations.

Another woman wrote that she had been asked to sit in someone’s lap twice during a business meeting where HR and other executives were present. No one objected. The HR leader was later promoted, while the woman was reprimanded for not following policy, despite raising the inappropriateness of the request in the moment.

One woman mentioned that during a roundtable with women from Xbox, nearly all the women said they had been called a “bitch” at work.

More common complaints in the online discussion centered on feeling stymied in promotion, trying to balance assertiveness with pressure to appear nice, and the bias and disparate treatment that allegedly comes with being labeled a “diversity hire.”

“We are fed up,” one employee told WIRED. “I know there are James Damores at Microsoft, they just haven’t written a memo like he did,” the employee said, in reference to the former Google employee who ignited a debate with a treatise against Google's diversity hiring practices.

Over the past couple of weeks, the discussion expanded to other distribution lists and circulated widely within Microsoft. Employees were still responding to the thread as of Thursday morning. On March 29, Hogan responded to the group to say that she had discussed the thread with Nadella that day. “We are appalled and sad to hear about these experiences,” Hogan wrote. “It is very painful to hear these stories and to know that anyone is facing such behavior at Microsoft. We must do better.”