A former Bloomberg anchor claims she was fired in retaliation for her complaints about discrimination and gender pay gaps at the network.
Su Keenan, a 25-year vet at the network, filed a wrongful termination suit this week in New York, alleging she was escorted out of the Bloomberg offices in February and told her job was cut “due to structural changes” after she complained about “unlawful” behavior by her managers. The former anchor claims Bloomberg violated multiple counts of the New York State Human Rights Law, as well as the state’s laws against unequal pay and workplace retaliation. She seeks compensation including back pay, future lost earnings, and damages covering emotional pain and suffering. Bloomberg did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Bloomberg has a long history of a systemic top-down sexist culture created and condoned by its co-founder and majority owner, Michael Bloomberg, and top male executives,” Keenan alleged in the complaint.
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Under this “sexist” environment “where men are at the highest levels making all key decisions that adversely impact women,” she added, “men are promoted to higher levels and at faster rates” and men are assigned to more desirable subjects than their female co-workers. Keenan said she presented Bloomberg bosses with data in mid-2023 showing how a male colleague 20 years her junior, working a nearly identical job, was paid $100,000 more per year with nearly double the annual bonus.
She also claimed she hadn’t received a raise since 2012 and was regularly denied bonuses because of performance reviews targeting her despite “exceeding every goal by 3-5 times the stated objective.” Keenan also alleged that she and another older female anchor were pushed to work midnight shifts while younger colleagues got the preferable time slots.
After being denied raises in 2022 and 2023, even though “most media colleagues received 5% raises, on average,” Keenan said she formally complained to Bloomberg human resources about alleged discrimination and retaliation. The HR department closed the investigation and called it a “non-issue.”
Following that, Keenan claimed, the retaliatory conduct began.
In the months before her firing, Keenan said that while Bloomberg planned to move all of her Asia-TV on-air colleagues to Hong Kong, she was given the option to stay in New York. Her job was “absolutely” secure, she claimed to have been told. However, Keenan described treatment that ultimately sounds like the story of Milton from Office Space.
“Just weeks after Plaintiff highlighted her manager’s unlawful acts and her issuance of yet another false, discriminatory Performance Evaluation, Plaintiff’s desk was relocated to a vacant lower floor on the far side of the block-long Bloomberg building, a football field away from the TV studio,” the complaint alleged. Keenan further claimed that the network deliberately made last-minute changes to her TV hit times, forcing her to scramble up stairways to get to the studio on time.
Ultimately, Keenan wrote, the anchor “was barred from returning to the newsroom and swiftly escorted out of the building by two guards.” All while two other employees supposedly fired for “restructuring” were allowed to gather their belongings and say goodbye to colleagues.
