The manager – at Alibaba’s City Retail unit, which offers
grocery delivery from local supermarkets – “has been fired and will never be
rehired”, Zhang said in a memo published on Alibaba’s intranet that was seen by
Reuters.
The man told management there were “intimate acts” with the
employee when she was inebriated, Zhang said in the memo, adding that the
police is investigating the matter.
Reuters was unable to reach the individual for comment.
“Alibaba Group has a zero-tolerance policy against sexual
misconduct, and ensuring a safe workplace for all our employees is Alibaba’s
top priority,” a company spokesperson told Reuters when asked about the memo.
Over the weekend, a female staffer posted an 11-page account
on Alibaba’s intranet in which she said her supervisor and a client sexually
assaulted her while on a business trip, and that managers had failed to take
action.
Threads related to the incident subsequently ranked among
the top-trending on Weibo, China’s Twitter-esque microblog, which has been alight
with discussion of the #MeToo anti-sexual harassment movement following a
celebrity sex scandal last week.
Zhang said the City Retail unit’s president and human
resources head had resigned over the incident, and that Alibaba’s chief people
officer has “received a demerit”.
Investigations into other individuals referred to in the
victim’s account are ongoing, Zhang added in the memo.
Alibaba will conduct company-wide training for the
prevention of sexual harassment and launch a channel for staff to report
incidents, Zhang said in the memo. It will also issue a formal, zero-tolerance
anti-sexual harassment policy.
Zhang also said Alibaba is staunchly opposed to “the ugly
culture of forced drinking”.
The memo detailed the victim’s account of the incident, in
which she recalled superiors ordering her to drink alcohol with coworkers
during dinner on a business trip.
“Regardless of gender, whether it is a request made by a
customer or supervisor, our employees are empowered to reject it,” Zhang said
in the memo.
“This incident is a humiliation for all Alibaba employees.
We must rebuild, and we must change,” he said.
Failure to act
Many of the comments over the weekend centred on Alibaba’s
failure to act until the allegations went public. The scandal engulfed Alibaba
just as it is trying to move past a bruising months-long investigation by
antitrust regulators into monopolistic behaviour such as forced exclusivity,
which helped kick off Beijing’s current broad campaign against online
industries from ride-hailing to fintech and education.
Alibaba has become the highest-profile symbol of abuses
regarded as prevalent throughout Chinese businesses and at tech firms, rooted
in a hard-charging environment that often prioritises profit and achievement
over culture.
The #MeToo movement first came to prominence there in 2018
when allegations against a professor at a Beijing university were published on
social media. Since then, a number of allegations have been made against
academics, environmentalists and journalists.
In one of the highest-profile incidents so far, JD.com Inc.
founder Richard Liu was arrested in the United States in 2018 and accused of
raping a 21-year-old female Chinese undergraduate, though prosecutors there
subsequently decided not to press charges against the billionaire.
More recently, former Korean boy band member Kris Wu has
been detained after a university student accused him of pressuring young women
into sex.
“I expect the biggest impact to be recruitment and talent
management,” said Michael Norris, an analyst with Shanghai-based consultancy
AgencyChina. “Alibaba’s growth required a strong talent pipeline across various
business units. This incident may dissuade promising female graduates and
highly-qualified female managers from joining Alibaba.”
But the country’s largest corporations have thus far been largely shielded from the upheaval of the #MeToo movement in the West, in part because of a lack of recourse for reporting incidents and longstanding sexist norms.
Businesses also have tended to deal with gender discrimination away from
the public spotlight. From hazing rituals during which women simulate sex acts to
forced drinking and job ads that use women as bait to lure male workers, sexism
remains endemic particularly in the tech industry.