“As a white male, what are you personally doing to fix the broken, sexist culture at Riot?”

At the moment, I am doing a lot of listening to make sure the women on my team and at Riot feel like we hear them, we really understand their point of view, and we understand what they want changed.

Some of the episodes mentioned that qualify as harassment or worse are horrible and inexcusable, and I would not allow them on my teams. I have fired people for such behavior at Riot and also at Blizzard. It’s a dissatisfying ending to the story because you typically don’t announce why someone is being terminated, and that is particularly true if there is a victim involved that you want to protect. As a leader at Riot, I have to make sure that the rest of the organization doesn’t tolerate it either.

I am personally more worried about the chilling effect that can happen if women feel like their ideas are not being heard, or they don’t receive fair pay or opportunities for promotion. I take those problems really seriously and I would like to think that women who have been on my teams feel like they have been recognized for their accomplishments. But it would be more meaningful to ask the women.

Historically, Riot has desired that all our new hires be active game players, and ideally League players. Like many games, League skews heavily male, so we are starting with an already smaller pool for potential applicants. We are trying to explore new avenues for how we source potential applicants, and while I think it’s challenging to really be good at game development if you don’t love games, we think there are opportunities there to broaden the kind of folks we interview.

Look, this is an industry (gaming specifically, but tech at large) that has a pretty terrible track record for women and minorities. It has been a problem everywhere I have worked, and sadly Riot is not immune either. Riot talks a lot more about culture than anywhere I have worked, so perhaps that makes it doubly disappointing that we haven’t been able to deliver. Industry-wide, if not culturally-wide, these issues are not easy to fix, but they are important to fix, and that gives me hope that we won’t give up.

8/15/2018