Augmented reality startup Magic Leap is being sued for sexual discrimination by an executive who was hired to help it appeal to women.

The company, a startup best known for securing a valuation in the billions despite never publicly demonstrating its technology, is being sued by Tannen Campbell, its former head of, and later vice-president of, strategic marketing and brand identity.

Campbell alleges that, in her first few months at Magic Leap, she was asked to put together a presentation to highlight the lack of gender diversity in the company. In her case, filed in the southern district court of Florida, she alleges it took seven months to get chief executive, Rony Abovitz, to attend the presentation, and when he did he left halfway through. Campbell never managed to present the second half.

A year later, another Magic Leap employee, Rachna Bhasin, was asked to head up what the filing describes as “a ‘female brain trust initiative’ – the ‘FBI’”. Bhasin, Campbell and five other women from the company were involved in the initial meeting, in May 2016, alongside Abovitz, the vice-president of product design, Gary Natsume, and “a couple of male members of his team”.

Campbell describes a “chaotic discussion”, in which a number of recommendations were made about a prototype design of Magic Leap’s hardware, “such as not having the headset connect in the back of the head because such a connection is difficult for people with ponytails or long hair”. None of the proposed changes were made to the design, and later meetings, which were not attended by any of the male members of the team, resulted in “no clear path forward”.

As well as presenting an image of a company where Campbell’s efforts to create a female-friendly workplace and product were coolly received, the suit also alleges more direct tolerance of sexist comments and attitudes. The suit alleges:

An image of two doctors, a man and a woman, prompted the comment “look, it’s Bring Your Wife to Work Day”.

One of the three or four core apps that will ship with Magic Leap’s headset “is a game, ‘Dr. G.,’ that has no female heroes or lead characters”. The one female character in the narrative, who isn’t in the game itself, “is a busty woman depicted on her knees grovelling at the heroes’ feet in admiration”.

A group for “magic leap spouses” which was explicitly targeted at “board [sic] wives at home” (the bracketed “[sic]” is in the court filing).



A new hire orientation included the unprepared advice: “in IT we have a saying; stay away from the Three Os: Orientals, Old People and Ovaries”. Campbell was told the person in question would not be giving new hire orientations in the future as a result, but that did not happen.



Campbell alleges that events like those construe a hostile working environment, and is asking for punitive damages from Magic Leap. The company has not responded to a request for comment.



The lawsuit is the latest piece of bad news for Magic Leap, after a string of stories that began with a report in December 2016 that the company was struggling to incorporate the “dazzling” technology it had used to wow investors into the product it was planning to release.

Alternative Dave (@redletterdave) SCOOP!!! This is the FIRST PUBLIC PHOTO of MAGIC LEAP https://t.co/6hPEMe6eCg pic.twitter.com/oWKBJvKmza

In February, it had to combat mockery after the first picture of its hardware leaked, showing a clunky prototype worn on a backpack. Abovitz responded by arguing that the picture showed “an R&D test rig where we collect room/space data for our machine vision/machine learning work”.