After Proudly Celebrating Women, Alibaba Faces Reckoning Over Harassment

A rape accusation at the Chinese e-commerce giant has shed light on a work culture that some former employees say is humiliating and toxic.

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 straddle her male co-worker in front of colleagues. Top executives traded lewd comments about male virility at company events and online. The e-commerce giant Alibaba, one of China’s most globalized internet companies, has often celebrated the number of women in its senior ranks. In 2018, the company’s billionaire co-founder, Jack Ma, told a conference in Geneva that one secret to Alibaba’s success was that 49 percent of employees were women. But that message of female empowerment is now being called into question after an Alibaba employee accused her boss of raping her after an alcohol-fueled business dinner. The woman, who has been identified by the police and her lawyers only by her surname, Zhou, said her complaints were shrugged off by bosses and human resources. She eventually resorted to screaming about the incident in a company cafeteria last month.