Augmented reality startup Magic Leap is being sued for sexual discrimination by an executive who was hired to help it appeal to women. 
 
 The company, a startup best known for securing a valuation in the billions despite never publicly demonstrating its technology, is being sued by Tannen Campbell, its former head of, and later vice-president of, strategic marketing and brand identity. 
 
 Campbell alleges that, in her first few months at Magic Leap, she was asked to put together a presentation to highlight the lack of gender diversity in the company. In her case, filed in the southern district court of Florida, she alleges it took seven months to get chief executive, Rony Abovitz, to attend the presentation, and when he did he left halfway through. Campbell never managed to present the second half. 
 
 A year later, another Magic Leap employee, Rachna Bhasin, was asked to head up what the filing describes as “a ‘female brain trust initiative’ – the ‘FBI’”. Bhasin, Campbell and five other women from the company were involved in the initial meeting, in May 2016, alongside Abovitz, the vice-president of product design, Gary Natsume, and “a couple of male members of his team”. 
 
 Campbell describes a “chaotic discussion”, in which a number of recommendations were made about a prototype design of Magic Leap’s hardware, “such as not having the headset connect in the back of the head because such a connection is difficult for people with ponytails or long hair”. None of the proposed changes were made to the design, and later meetings, which were not attended by any of the male members of the team, resulted in “no clear path forward”. 
 
 As well as presenting an image of a company where Campbell’s efforts to create a female-friendly workplace and product were coolly received, the suit also alleges more direct tolerance of sexist comments and attitudes. The suit alleges: 
 
 An image of two doctors, a man and a woman, prompted the comment “look, it’s Bring Your Wife to Work Day”. 
 
 One of the three or four core apps that will ship with Magic Leap’s headset “is a game, ‘Dr. G.,’ that has no female heroes or lead characters”. The one female character in the narrative, who isn’t in the game itself, “is a busty woman depicted on her knees grovelling at the heroes’ feet in admiration”. 
 
 A group for “magic leap spouses” which was explicitly targeted at “board [sic] wives at home” (the bracketed “[sic]” is in the court filing). 
 
 
 
 A new hire orientation included the unprepared advice: “in IT we have a saying; stay away from the Three Os: Orientals, Old People and Ovaries”. Campbell was told the person in question would not be giving new hire orientations in the future as a result, but that did not happen. 
 
 
 
 Campbell alleges that events like those construe a hostile working environment, and is asking for punitive damages from Magic Leap. The company has not responded to a request for comment. 
 
 
 
 The lawsuit is the latest piece of bad news for Magic Leap, after a string of stories that began with a report in December 2016 that the company was struggling to incorporate the “dazzling” technology it had used to wow investors into the product it was planning to release. 
 
 Alternative Dave (@redletterdave) SCOOP!!! This is the FIRST PUBLIC PHOTO of MAGIC LEAP https://t.co/6hPEMe6eCg pic.twitter.com/oWKBJvKmza 
 
 In February, it had to combat mockery after the first picture of its hardware leaked, showing a clunky prototype worn on a backpack. Abovitz responded by arguing that the picture showed “an R&D test rig where we collect room/space data for our machine vision/machine learning work”. ||||| Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz Getty A newly filed lawsuit by a former Magic Leap VP alleges that the company is a hostile working place for women, a condition that has led to the company missing internal deadlines, according to the complaint. 
 
 Tannen Campbell, whose lawsuit in Southern Florida District Court says she was a VP of marketing and brand identity, says in the complaint that she was hired by Rony Abovitz, the CEO by the Dania Beach, Florida-based company to "help with the pink/blue" problem, referring to the lack of women in leadership positions at the company. 
 
 She also claims that Magic Leap had a culture that assumed its employees were men, including what she says was an internal email describing a policy for "bored wives at home while you are loving it at the Leap." 
 
 "All the engineers and others in predominately-male Magic Leap could conceive of to make the product female friendly was to produce a version in pink," the lawsuit alleges. 
 
 According to Campbell's complaint, many of the executives at Magic Leap blocked her efforts to reform company policy before she was fired in late December. 
 
 Magic Leap has raised $1.39 billion dollars in venture capital, valuing the company at $4.5 billion, from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Google, JPMorgan, Fidelity and Alibaba. The company promises to integrate computer graphics into the real world in a stunning way — a whale jumping out of a gym floor, for example. 
 
 But as Business Insider has previously reported, questions remain whether the company can shrink its technology into a mobile, portable form factor. A prototype described to Business Insider by a source as "the real wearable" and by CEO Abovitz as "R&D; test rig where we collect room/space data" shows a bulky backpack containing the device's computer power, although sources and the lawsuit describe the company's prototype as a "belt pack." 
 
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 Former employees also describe a company with sprawling operations. The lawsuit alleges that the startup has over 1000 employees. 
 
 Magic Leap did not immediately return requests for comment. 
 
 Missed deadlines 
 
 Campbell, who is suing for Magic Leap for sex discrimination, retaliation and hostile work environment, connects the lack of women in Magic Leap's leadership and engineering department with claims of missed internal deadlines. 
 
 From the complaint: 
 
 "The macho bullying atmosphere at Magic Leap fosters a dysfunctional culture which creates chaos and lack of process and structure, hinders the company from achieving key product deadlines (including launch, which has shifted back at least 4 times in Campbell's 1.5 years at the company) and, literally, prevented Campbell from doing the job she was hired to do or achieving the goals she and Abovitz had discussed during her initial interview: helping with the "pink/blue problem" or making Magic Leap less of a "boys club."" 
 
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 "Sadly, because Magic Leap seldom hires and does not actively recruit female candidates, the company loses competitive advantage to products like Microsoft's Hololens. Microsoft, which employs far more females on its team, developed its similar product on a faster time line with more content that appeals to both genders." 
 
 One of the things Campbell connects to her eventual firing was that she challenged Magic Leap CEO Abovitz, comparing herself to the child in the "Emperor's New Clothes" who pointed out that the emperor was naked and not in fact wearing extremely cool invisible clothes. 
 
 From the complaint: 
 
 Campbell also raised concerns that what Magic Leap showed the public in marketing material was not what the product actually could do—admonitions ignored in favor of her male colleagues' assertions that the images and videos presented on Magic Leap's website and on YouTube were "aspirational," and not Magic Leap's version of "alternate facts." 
 
 Here's the full complaint: 
 
 Know anything about Magic Leap? Email the author at kleswing@businessinsider.com. ||||| Magic Leap, the mysterious augmented reality startup, continues its slow implosion. 
 
 On Monday, a new lawsuit alleged that the Plantation, Fla.-based company promoted a sexist work environment and used misleading marketing materials that inaccurately depicted the product's capabilities. 
 
 Tannen Campbell, Magic Leap's former vice president of strategic marketing and brand identity, filed the suit in a federal court in the Southern District of Florida. 
 
 The lawsuit alleged Campbell was fired because the company's CEO, Rony Abovitz, refused to acknowledge the misogyny within the company and address a hostile work environment. The company is accused of violating the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin and religion. Ultimately, these workplace problems, the lawsuit reads, "renders it so dysfunctional it continues to delay the launch of a product that attracted billions of investment dollars." 
 
 Founded in 2010, the company is developing an augmented reality headset that superimposes virtual objects onto the real world, and has amassed $1.4 billion from the likes Google and Alibaba, despite no announced product for sale yet. Late last year, an article by the Information reported that investors poured money into the company after seeing impressive demonstrations of early prototypes, but the actual first commercial product will unlikely possess those same capabilities. And last week, a Business Insider article showed a widely-mocked image of what is reportedly a crude prototype of the device. 
 
 In the lawsuit, Campbell said she brought up concerns that the company was showing off marketing material that didn't accurately reflect what Magic Leap's technology could actually do. The warnings were "ignored in favor of her male colleagues’ assertions that the images and videos presented on Magic Leap’s website and on YouTube were 'aspirational,' and not Magic Leap’s version of 'alternate facts,' " the lawsuit said in an apparent reference to U.S. President Donald J. Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway's infamous use of the term "alternative facts." 
 
 Campbell joined Magic Leap in April 2015 when there were no women in leadership positions, the lawsuit said. During Campbell's initial interview at Magic Leap, she joked that the company's advertising department was a "boys club," but Abovitz told her he was looking to change that. 
 
 "All the engineers and others in predominately-male Magic Leap could conceive of to make the product female friendly was to produce a version in pink," the lawsuit said. 
 
 The company's mostly male leadership team is made up of what the lawsuit described as "Abovitz sycophants." The one female leader, chief business officer Rachna Bhasin, is characterized as "the perfect Magic Leap female employee: she went [to] Harvard, never disagrees with Abovitz and always does Abovitz's bidding even when common sense or her own experience run counter. She makes the company appear diverse and inclusive although it is not." 
 
 In the first few months at Magic Leap, Campbell said she tried to change things. She came up with a PowerPoint presentation that outlined that only 14% of overall Magic Leap employees were female and 3% of engineering staff were female. She offered proposals to encourage more female inclusion in the short term, like recruiting from colleges with high numbers of female engineers, and in the long term, like tying bonuses to boosting diversity numbers. The lawsuit said Abovitz kept putting off these meetings, or cutting them short when they happened. 
 
 Eventually, Abovitz put together the "female brain trust initiative" (or FBI), headed up by Bhasin, to make sure Magic Leap product design and content was developed with women in mind. The first meeting on May 18, 2016 presented a prototype with the power supply implemented in a "belt pack," and recommended not having the headset connect in the back of the head, to make it easier to wear for people with long hair or ponytails. The group make no inroads and none of the proposals made it into the design process. The group was pure "window dressing," the lawsuit alleged. Abovitz and other men didn't show up to later meetings. 
 
 The lawsuit said three or four core apps that the standard Magic Leap headset will end up shipping with included a game called "Dr. G," which had no lead female characters. The one female character is "busty" and depicted as groveling on her knees at the main character's feet. Campbell complained repeatedly to the designers with no success about the game's misogyny, the complaint said. 
 
 Sexist attitudes were abundant at the company, the lawsuit said. In one instance, Campbell attended a conference call in September 2016 with several executives to talk with advertising agency R/GA. During the call, Magic Leap CFO Scott Henry said, "I’m sitting here between two beautiful ladies. They’re not going to want to put a big ugly device over their pretty faces. And I have an office with glass doors, I don’t want people to see me with these beautiful girls with ugly things on their faces," the complaint alleged, referring to Campbell and the company's head of operations, Tina Tuli. After the call, R/GA executives expressed concern about Henry's remarks. 
 
 Campbell, who joined as head of advertising, was made vice president only after she asked for the promotion in September 2016. Campbell said in the lawsuit that this is an example of the company's leadership inability to make decisions. 
 
 "Abovitz was incapable of making decisions," the lawsuit said, "but rather kept putting things off pending more meetings and assigning more people to solve the problem, which was one of the primary reasons Magic Leap could not bring its product to market." 
 
 After the the promotion, the complaint said Campbell was marginalized in the leadership team. In her last four months, it said Abovitz "who always had been pouty and prone to temper-tantrums, began to dig his heels in even more in the face of dissenting ideas and to explode ever more frequently into child-like fits of rage, threatening retribution when he didn’t get his way, felt betrayed or was portrayed publically [sic] in an unfavorable light." 
 
 In Campbell's final months at Magic Leap, Abovitz disinvited her from meetings. In November 2016, Abovitz told Campbell to interview employees about their opinions of the company. She told Abovitz Magic Leap should instead work towards branding for a target audience, not just employees. Regardless, Campbell followed orders and presented her findings on December 20, but was instead fired. Magic Leap offered Campbell a three-months severance if she released all claims against the company. She refused to sign. 
 
 The lawsuit alleged the company's sexism has lead to dysfunction and is losing out to competitors like Microsoft's HoloLens. "Microsoft, which employs far more females on its team, developed its similar product on a faster time line with more content that appeals to both genders," the complainant said. 
 
 Magic Leap hasn't responded to a request for comment. 
 
 Follow me on Twitter @aatilley or send me an email: atilley@forbes.com
– An augmented reality startup is being sued for sex discrimination by the very female executive it hired to make it less of a "boy's club," the Guardian reports. When Tannen Campbell was hired by Magic Leap in 2015, the Florida company had no women in leadership roles and its only idea to make its product female-friendly was to release a pink version, according to Forbes. The lawsuit filed by Campbell following her firing in December describes a "macho bullying atmosphere," Business Insider reports. That allegedly includes tolerating sexist and offensive behavior, such as telling new hires to stay away from "Orientals, Old People, and Ovaries" and having the only female character in a centerpiece app "on her knees grovelling at the heroes." Furthermore, Campbell alleges her efforts to change the culture at Magic Leap were consistently thwarted. The lawsuit states Campbell was asked to put together a presentation on the lack of gender diversity at the company, but it took seven months for Magic Leap's chief executive to show up for the presentation, and he left in the middle of it. Campbell says she and other female employees were ignored when giving input on the design of the product and its marketing. The lawsuit, which also alleges a hostile work environment and retaliation, claims the sexist culture at Magic Leap created a "dysfunctional" workplace and is part of the reason the company has yet to actually release a product despite being valued at billions of dollars.