Rivian publicly boasts about its culture, so it was a crushing blow when I joined the company and almost immediately experienced a toxic bro culture that marginalizes women and contributes to the company making mistakes. I raised concerns to HR about the gender discrimination from my manager, the “boys club” culture, and the impact it was having on me, my team, and the company. Two days later, my boss fired me.
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The culture at Rivian was carefully cultivated, but not in the manner it was advertised. Rivian in many ways resembled other automotive companies, dominated by men at the top; however, the most striking difference between Rivian and the other companies where I had worked was a lack of automotive experience among the other executives. The company’s founder, R.J. Scaringe, was clearly and literally in the driver’s seat, and he surrounded himself with a tight knit group of men who constantly had his ear. Many of these men had worked together before or hired one another and had created their own “boys’ club”.
The bro culture affected how the most important decisions were being made at the company. Despite my 20 years of auto experience, and my position as VP of Sales and Marketing, I was excluded from crucial meetings that impacted our mission and my team. Time and time again, I raised concerns regarding vehicle pricing and manufacturing deadlines, but no one listened, even though I have extensive experience launching and pricing vehicles. It wasn’t until my (often less experienced) male colleagues raised the exact same ideas that the Chief Growth Officer (internally called Chief Commercial Officer) would respond. Never in my years in the auto industry had I experienced such blatant marginalization.
Exclusion became a pattern, and I was left out of countless meetings where business needs and my role dictate that I should have been present. I thought that my years of experience and my deep knowledge and expertise had earned me a spot at the table, but at Rivian it did not. While my male colleagues sat in the meeting room without me, I could not even schedule one on one meetings with my boss the Chief Growth Officer. He told me he would only communicate with me by instant messenger and that would be outside office hours, ‘late in the evening’.
Finally, I asked another female senior executive to please include me in meetings regarding sales planning and volumes, which were key to my work leading the sales and marketing organization. I was stunned when she informed me that she was also excluded from these meetings, which were key to her role as well. It is unbelievable that two high-level female executives would be left out of these meetings directly impacting their work. This was not the culture that Rivian prided itself on, and I realized that to change it I needed to raise my voice.
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I pointed out that there was no coincidence in my firing and my raising concerns of bro culture and gender discrimination just two days earlier. The very person I had flagged as promoting the discriminatory culture was the person who terminated me.
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