Justin Mateen, a co-founder of the wildly popular mobile dating app Tinder, has been removed from his job pending an investigation after the company's former vice president of marketing accused him of extensive sexual harassment in a lawsuit.
The suit, filed by former VP of marketing Whitney Wolfe, also names Tinder CEO Sean Rad, who, she says, witnessed and condoned Mateen's abuse. But while IAC acknowledges that Mateen sent messages containing "inappropriate content," it believes Rad and the company are innocent of the allegations.
How inappropriate was the content of those messages? Wolfe, who had dated Mateen, says he called her a "slut," a "gold digger" and a "whore," among other things, and hounded her for details about her personal life long after the two had stopped dating. In text messages included in the complaint, he talked about "middle aged Muslim pigs" and referred to someone else as "that homo."
Wolfe also claims that Rad and Mateen refused to credit her as a co-founder even though she was among the five people who started Tinder, and told her it was because "you're a girl." She says she appealed repeatedly to Rad for help, only to be told she was being "dramatic."
Wolfe resigned from Tinder in April 2014. She says she was bullied into resigning by Rad, who told her otherwise he would fire her in a way that would affect her future job prospects.
Part of a text message exchange between Justin Mateen and Whitney Wolfe included in Wolfe's legal... [+]
People who know Mateen say using vulgar and insensitive language in professional settings doesn't sound particularly out of character. Indeed, a profile in Businessweek last year described an incident where he and Rad responded enthusiastically to a bit of online misogyny:
In March, Rad and Mateen posted to their personal Instagram feeds a new definition from UrbanDictionary.com: “Tinderslut: A girl that sleeps with men using the popular dating application called Tinder.” Mateen’s caption gave it two emoji thumbs up. (“I’m deleting that now,” Rad says when asked about it. “I don’t think you should delete it!” Mateen responds. “It was an exciting day for us!”)
[Update: I've rounded up some other public evidence of a sexist company culture, as captured on social media.]
Whatever the outcome of Wolfe's suit, Tinder has now become yet another data point in an increasingly hard to ignore pattern of sexist culture in the tech industry. It joins:
-Snapchat, whose CEO, Evan Spiegel, was sending raunchy and chauvinist emails to his fraternity brothers at Stanford around the same time he was hatching plans for his disappearing-photos app.
-The venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, sued last year by a junior partner who accused her colleagues of rampant sexual harassment and gender bias.
-GitHub, which engineer Julie Ann Horvath accused of being a "boys' club" and discriminating against women.
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And the list goes on.
