Former Senior Adviser for Amazon is Suing Company Executives for Discrimination and Harassment
A Black Amazon senior manager and former economic policy adviser to Sen. Cory Booker is suing the tech giant and two of its current executives for alleged race and gender discrimination, and for allegedly violating the Equality Pay Act, according to a lawsuit filed in district court in Washington, DC, on Monday. The suit also alleges that a former Amazon executive sexually harassed and assaulted her.
Charlotte Newman, a senior manager who has worked in the Amazon Web Services division of the company since January 2017, told Recode in an interview that the discrimination began when she was first hired at a level lower for a public policy manager role than she applied for — and what she believes her qualifications justified.
She said the discrimination continued when she was denied a promotion for more than a year even though she was performing aspects of the more senior role and had begun pushing her manager to assign her to a higher level. She was elevated to a senior manager position in fall 2019, more than two and a half years after being hired. Newman said what made matters worse was that her first boss, an AWS director named Steve Block, employed what she believed were racial stereotypes in telling her that her communication style was “too direct,” and “just scary,” and that she “can intimidate people.”
