A software engineer who claims she was fired by Wikipedia’s parent organization after complaining about harassment is speaking publicly for the first time since filing a lawsuit against the company.
The woman, Kayla Mae (who also uses the name Kayla Morgan), said she still believes that the Wikimedia Foundation is “doing good, crucial even, things for the world,” but that the organization lacks clear direction and policies to deal with harassment and that her story is one of many quietly told by current and former workers who have faced similar abuse over the years.
On Tuesday, Mae took to Reddit to offer her first public comments about her short employment at the Wikimedia Foundation and the subsequent wrongful termination lawsuit that was filed.
Mae said that the “bigotry” expressed in her lawsuit is “organization wide” and that most of her former colleagues “are as against the problems in leadership as I was.”
“Unfortunately, I became the squeaky wheel for management to retaliate against by reporting the discrimination to [human resources] instead of quietly leaving like others did,” Mae wrote.
Mae was hired by the Wikimedia Foundation in November 2022 to work as a software engineer in a remote role. She was based in Texas; her direct supervisor, Dennis Mbuguru (who also goes by the name Dennis Muthuri), was based in Kenya.
From the moment she was hired, Mae — a transgender woman who is neurodivergent — claims she faced abuse and harassment by Mbuguru, to the point that she filed complaints with Wikimedia Foundation’s human resources department.
Three months after she was hired, human resources officials at Wikimedia Foundation apparently sustained some of Mae’s complaints, according to her lawsuit. Mae didn’t say if Wikimedia Foundation took any action against Mbuguru, but she remained on his team and under his direct supervision.
Several months later, Mae filed another complaint against Mburugu and requested to be transferred to another team. Rather than accepting her request, Wikimedia Foundation quizzed Mae about her harassment, then fired her, she says.
Mae filed a wrongful termination complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; earlier this year, she received a response from the agency affirming her right to sue, which paved the way for the lawsuit filed last month.
Mbuguru and three other Wikimedia Foundation employees who investigated Mae’s complaint of harassment — Tatiana Tompkins, DeJa Hamilton and Sai Suman Cherukwada — still work for the organization, according to numerous online profiles. The Wikimedia Foundation has not returned multiple requests for comment.
Mae said working at Wikimedia Foundation was “my dream job…and I felt unbelievably betrayed.”
“When I was fired, I received several emails from former co-workers expressing concern at WMF’s leadership, and similar stories of people terminated in suspicious ways,” Mae said, using the initialism for the Wikimedia Foundation.
“One person called Suman a ‘fixer’ who goes after employees that were seen as stirring the pot,” Mae continued. She alleges that the Wikimedia Foundation responded to her Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint by saying that the organization intended to fire Mae before the meeting where she was informed of her termination over Zoom.
“In some ways, I think it was an extra f–k you, so my health insurance would expire immediately,” Mae said.
While Wikimedia Foundation has administrative offices in San Francisco, most of its workers are remote — including Mae, Mbuguru and most of the human resources officials who investigated Mae’s complaint. Still, a number of Wikimedia Foundation employees, past and current, have detailed allegations of workplace hostility that stretch back more than a decade.
On the website Glassdoor, a number of current and former employees say Wikimedia Foundation curries favor with progressive-minded donors by claiming to promote diversity, equity and inclusiveness (DEI) measures in its workplace hiring, promotions and practices, but that the organization ultimately falls short on executing those policies or holding senior managers to account.
In 2022, a former software engineer based in San Francisco complained Wikimedia managers “actively try to make you fail,” and that internal meetings “can get very tense due to hostile behavior,” and noted that certain technical teams “have a long and well-documented history of bullying.” Two months before that post, another employee wrote that the Wikimedia Foundation “does not care about DEI or BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) experiences,” and said there was “no support staff” to address “leadership’s bad behavior and toxic culture.”
Mae said she has heard from other people who express similar views.
“I am very grateful that I was able to compartmentalize this process, with a splash of righteous anger keeping me going,” Mae said on Tuesday. “It has been exhausting for me, too, and will continue to be exhausting for however long it’s in court.”
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Editor’s note: This story was updated early Tuesday morning to note certain alternate names used by the plaintiff and her former manager at the Wikimedia Foundation.
