After Meta removed tampons from men’s bathrooms in company office buildings earlier this month, some employees started coordinating “quiet rebellions” by bringing in their own, according to a new report.
In early January, CEO Mark Zuckerberg overhauled a variety of Meta’s internal and external policies, ranging from lifting restrictions on speech to “restore free expression” across his platforms to changing its “Hateful Conduct” policy to allow criticism of gender identity.
One internal move that irked woke Meta employees was the removal of women’s sanitary products from men’s bathrooms, which the company had previously provided for nonbinary and transgender employees.
According to The New York Times on Wednesday, “To protest Mr. Zuckerberg’s actions, some Meta workers soon brought their own tampons, pads and liners to the men’s bathrooms, five people with knowledge of the effort said. A group of employees also circulated a petition to save the tampons.”
The vice president of workplace services reportedly emailed the petition signatories directly.
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The email suggested that while it had “not been the intention of Meta leadership to make employees feel unwelcome or excluded in our offices, at this point we do not have plans to revisit our on-site amenities offerings.”
The email, however, did promise to “share your feedback with leadership.”
“The sanitary products were emblematic of the quiet rebellions that Silicon Valley workers have staged as they grapple with the rightward shift of their bosses,” the Times reported, describing the tech giants’ embrace of Trump and attendance of his inauguration as “a major departure for a tech industry that has typically leaned left and liberal.”
But while company leadership is normalizing relations with the president in the public eye, employees, according to the outlet, are engaged in “subtle acts of defiance.”
“The quiet dissent underlines who wields the power in Silicon Valley these days: the bosses,” the Times observed, noting that this “subtle resistance” is a stark contrast to tech employees’ more public protests during the first Trump administration.
The Times claimed that according to an internal poll, one question that Meta employees wanted to ask of Zuckerberg at an upcoming company Q&A was how women at Meta could provide “masculine energy” to the office.
During an interview with Joe Rogan on Jan. 10, Zuckerberg had argued that “masculine energy” is a positive force.
The Times reported the company changed how employees could participate and “said it would ‘skip questions that we expect might be unproductive if they leak.’”
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