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Ex-Employee Claims Women At Facebook Told Not To Dress 'Distractingly'

Ex-Employee Claims Women At Facebook Told Not To Dress 'Distractingly'
FILE - In this Tuesday, April 12, 2016, file photo, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers the keynote address at the F8 Facebook Developer Conference in San Francisco. Facebook is under fire after a report from a Gawker site accused it of manipulating its âtrending topicsâ feature to promote or suppress certain political perspectives. Facebook has denied the claims, but the GOP-led U.S. Senate Commerce Committee has sent a letter to Zuckerberg requesting answers about the matter. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File)
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FILE - In this Tuesday, April 12, 2016, file photo, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers the keynote address at the F8 Facebook Developer Conference in San Francisco. Facebook is under fire after a report from a Gawker site accused it of manipulating its âtrending topicsâ feature to promote or suppress certain political perspectives. Facebook has denied the claims, but the GOP-led U.S. Senate Commerce Committee has sent a letter to Zuckerberg requesting answers about the matter. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File)

Many surveys have attested to the fact that Facebook is a great place to work at. However, if you are a woman employee there, you can be told not to dress in a distracting manner. This claim is one in a series of allegations made by Antonio Garcia Martinez, a former Facebook employee, in his new book, 'Monkey Chaos'. Martinez was fired from his job at Facebook.

“Our male HR authority, with occasional backup from his female counterpart, launched into a speech about avoiding clothing that ‘distracted’ coworkers. I’d later learn that managers did in fact occasionally pull aside female employees and read them the riot act,” Martinez says in the book.

According to a report released by Facebook in 2014, 69 percent of its employees at the time were male. And according to the Telegraph, 84 percent of employees in the technology division are male. Many former employees in the past have claimed that Facebook is a sexist place to work at.

Martinez calls Facebook a place that is run like the North Korean dictatorship, likening founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to an unquestionable leader.

He also said that once COO Sherly Sandberg lashed out on an engineer for using the pictures of kittens in a demo. The demo was about filtering obscene pictures so instead of actual pictures the engineers had used the kitten pictures.

Excerpts from the book, released before the book was out, claim that a lot of people thought of Zuckerberg as borderline psychopathic, whose sole mission was to destroy Google plus.

Martinez claims that the company has a KGB-styled workforce called 'The Sec,' whose job it is to keep an eye on the staff all the time. "We had slogans on the walls, we were all wearing a uniform. It all felt very North Korean or Cuban, almost. And so in that moment, I just realized... the motive force in history, which is one egomaniac's twitchy drive and then the common man's desire to be part of a compelling story -- which is what we were, we just were bit players in Zuckerberg's story," he told the CBS TV network in an interview.

The book also claims that Facebook considered employees 'dead' once they left the organization. There was a picture of tombstone posted on an employee's corporate ID card when they were about to leave.

“The moral of this story, a parable of the prodigal son but with an unforgiving father, was clear: fuck with Facebook and security guards would be hustling you out the door like a rowdy drunk at the late-night Taco Bell," the book says.

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.