Happy Nice Mall

At an employee dinner, women were told to rank the attractiveness of the men at the table. During a team-building exercise, a woman was pressured to restrain her male co-worker in front of her colleagues. Senior executives have made racy comments about men’s masculinity at company events and online.

E-commerce giant Alibaba, one of China’s most globalized internet companies, has often celebrated the number of women in its upper echelons. Jack Ma, the company’s billionaire co-founder in 2018, said: a conference in Geneva The only secret to Alibaba’s success was that 49 percent of its employees were women.

But this message of female empowerment is now being questioned after an Alibaba employee. blamed his boss For raping her after a drunken business lunch. The woman, who was identified by the police and her lawyers simply by her surname Zhou, said her complaints were ignored by bosses and human resources. He eventually resorted to screaming about the incident in a company cafeteria last month.

According to a video posted online, Ms. Zhou shouted, “An Ali male manager raped a female subordinate and no one in the company followed suit.”

Ms. Zhou’s case caused an uproar within the company and at China’s tech startup. Ali Dad fired the man accused of rape, said she would establish an anti-sexual harassment policy, and declared herself “strongly opposed to the outrageous culture of forced drinking.” But former Alibaba employees say the problems run much deeper than the company admits.

Interviews with nine former employees show that casual sexism is rampant at Alibaba. They describe a work environment where women are shamed and humiliated during team building and other activities the company incorporates into its culture, a striking departure from the image of inclusivity that Alibaba is trying to project.

The police investigation into Ms. Zhou’s case continues. Alibaba seems to be trying to cover up the controversy over the matter. According to two people with knowledge of the matter, the company recently fired 10 employees for leaking information about the incident. Many former employees who spoke to The New York Times asked not to reveal their names for fear of retaliation.

Alibaba told The Times that promoting a safe and supportive workplace is its top priority.

“We believe in taking responsibility and holding ourselves accountable when we fall short,” the statement said.

Alibaba made sudden changes The statement referred to Ms. Zhou’s handling of workplace culture and abuse issues after her case came to light. After reviewing its policies and reporting processes, the company found “some areas that do not meet our standards”.

The statement did not address any of the specific allegations made by former employees who spoke to The Times.

Many Alibaba departments use games and other icebreaker activities to make coworkers feel comfortable with each other. Kiki Qian joined the company in 2017. His team welcomed him with a game. He said that when he lost, he was punished by being forced to “fly by plane,” as his colleagues call it. The stunt involved walking past a male colleague while sitting in an office chair. The colleague then leaned back in the chair, causing Ms. Qian’s face to fall on her first.

“I realized that this might be a bit of a pervert while executing the sentence,” Ms. Qian, 28, said in a phone call.

On a separate occasion, Ms. Qian said she saw a woman burst into tears when she was pressured to jump into the arms of a male colleague during a team game.

Other former Alibaba employees He said their ice-breaking rituals included disturbing questions about their sexual histories. A former employee said she and other women were asked to rank their male colleagues by attractiveness at a team dinner. Another said he felt humiliated during a game where employees were asked to touch their shoulders, back and hips.

Ms. Qian said that after she told her boss that she would no longer participate in such activities, she understood that she would never advance in Alibaba. He resigned in 2018.

None of the women who spoke to The Times considered complaining to human resources about their ice-breaking experience. They said they doubted their complaints would be taken seriously.

“There was no way to complain about it; It was a tradition at Ali,” said Ms. Qian. “If you complain, people will think you’re the one with the problem.”

Since its early years as a small start-up, Alibaba has sought to create a work environment with a friendly familiarity. Employees refer to each other using company nicknames. Managers take an interest in the personal and family lives of employees.

But as the company has grown into a giant with over a quarter of a million employees, traditions that once seemed amusing now seem less innocent. Striving for intimacy and friendship, Alibaba has allowed vulgar, sexualized conversations to unfold in professional and sometimes highly visible settings.

Co-founder Mr. Ma set the tone. On May 10 each year, dozens of Alibaba employees and their spouses or partners attend a mock group wedding ceremony in celebration of the company’s “Ali Day”. At the 2018 event, Mr. Ma joked He’s on stage about how Alibaba’s grueling work hours affect employees’ sex lives.

“Before joining Alibaba I heard that for some people it was seven times a day, but not even once every seven days,” he said. “This is a big problem.”

Mr. Anne went even further with the riff at next year’s ceremony.

“We emphasize the spirit of 996 at work,” he said, referring to the practice of working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week, common in Chinese internet companies.

“We need 669 in life,” said Mr. Ma. “Six days, six times.” The word “nine” in Mandarin has the same sound as the word “longevity”. The crowd sang and applauded.

Ali Dad shared the comments, with a winking emoji on his official account on Chinese social media platform Weibo. Wang Shuai, the company’s public relations chief, Wrote on Weibo That Mr. Ma’s comments reminded him how good it is to be young. His post contained rough references to his anatomy.

Alibaba also provides its employees with a morale-boosting “Alibaba slang” handbook. Several entries are linked by sexual overtones. One encourages employees to be “hard and durable”.

Feng Yuan, a leading feminist in China, said the kind of behavior described on Alibaba can create conditions in which bullying and harassment are quietly tolerated and encouraged.

“Hierarchical power structures and toxic masculinity in male-dominated companies get stronger over time,” Ms. Feng said. “They are becoming hotbeds of sexual harassment and violence.”

Last month, Ms. Zhou shared the rape accusation on Alibaba’s internal website. According to his account of the events, his boss said to a male customer, who was also at the alcohol-driven business dinner, “Look how good I am; I brought you a beauty,” he said, referring to Ms. Zhou.

Drinking meals have long been commonplace in corporate China, where refusing to drink with a supervisor can be seen as offensive. Three days after Ms. Zhou reported the incident to Alibaba, her boss still had not been fired, she wrote on her own account. I was told this was not considered for its reputation.

“This is ridiculous logic,” he wrote. “Just who are they protecting?”

Elsie Chen contributing reporting and Albee Zhang and Claire Fu contributed to research.