‘I was forced to sleep with my boss,’ says former tech exec in $1.1M suit against Wipro

Here’s another shocking allegation of sexual harassment in the hallowed corridors of tech. A former executive of Indian IT bellwether Wipro told an employment tribunal in the UK that she was hand twisted into having an affair with her boss in their London office, The Daily Mail reports.

Thirty-nine-year-old Shreya Ukil, who lost her job with Wipro, is now suing the company for up to £1 million (US$1.12 million). The charges are sex and race discrimination, victimization, sexual harassment, unfair dismissal, and wrongful dismissal. Wipro has “a deeply predatory, misogynistic culture in which men are encouraged to have affairs, attend strip clubs, shout the loudest and support each other,” she said in a statement submitted to the Central London Employment Tribunal.

Wipro vowed to take legal action to defend itself against “defamatory allegations” made by its former employee.

According to Shreya’s LinkedIn profile, she has won four awards from Wipro for her work among other laurels, including recognition by EMC as being one of the Top 50 Women in Technology (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) in 2013.

If proven, Shreya’s case wouldn’t be an isolated case of workplace sexual harassment. A recent survey showed that one in three women has experienced sexual harassment at work at some point in their lives. But 71 percent of the women who said they’ve experienced workplace sexual harassment did not report the issue, the report highlighted.

See: Are you sexist and you don’t know it? Why you should ask yourself that if you’re in tech

The ‘aggressive’ married boss

In 2010, Shreya, who was working as a sales executive at Wipro’s headquarters in Bangalore, was transferred to the company office in London. She told the tribunal that her boss, Manoj Punja, who was married, made “aggressive sexual advances,” and when she resisted, she was told that she was “forgetting who she was talking to.”

When Shreya lost her job, she was Wipro’s head of sales, manufacturing, and hi-tech for Europe. Manoj was then the global head of sales.

Manoj, who worked with the company for 17 years, moved to Microland Ltd. in New Jersey as an executive vice president early this year. He holds an engineering degree from the Bangalore Institute of Technology.

Shreya holds an MSC in business intelligence and data science as well as an MBA in finance and marketing from the University of Leeds Business School.

The boys club

A larger problem