The executive suing Amazon Web Services: ?I wouldn?t want my worst enemy working there?

When Cindy Warner joined Amazon Web Services in February 2020, she saw it as an opportunity to increase diversity and reshape the company’s strategy. She recalls how AWS “aggressively” recruited her, offering a quick path to higher-level roles and better pay.

But just over a year after she joined, the promising job had become a nightmare.

Warner, a tech executive with 30 years of experience, said she had faced pay discrimination and an underlying culture of sexism and homophobia. She sued the cloud computing company in May 2021 – alleging that male executives at AWS treated her with “open contempt, insults, and hostility” and upheld a “white boys’ club” – and claims she was fired shortly after.

“I truly would not want my worst enemy to work at Amazon,” she told the Guardian, describing the workplace as “toxic” and alleging she was targeted for her work mentoring women and efforts to increase diversity and inclusion.

Her lawsuit is one of several Amazon is currently facing over allegations of workplace discrimination, and it underscores the challenges women face from the bottom to the top of the tech industry.

“This shows at Amazon, it does not matter if you have a lot of power on paper – the culture is going to impact you regardless of whether you are a high-powered executive or a lowly software engineer,” said Veena Dubal, a labor law professor at the University of California, Hastings. “At the end of the day, you are not really protected.”

An Amazon spokesperson, Jaci Anderson, said the company disputed Warner’s account and that it had conducted a thorough investigation and “found her allegations to be unsubstantiated”. (Warner has criticized the integrity of the AWS investigation.)