Uber Hires Former AG for Sexual Harassment Review

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick recently pledged to "conduct an independent review" into reports that upper direction at the company ignored incidents of sexual harassment.

This has been a long fourth dimension coming.

"I believe in creating a workplace where a deep sense of justice underpins everything we do," Kalanick wrote in an email to employees obtained by Recode.

Uber board member Arianna Huffington, Uber's new Principal Human Resources Officer Liane Hornsey, and Angela Padilla, Uber's Associate Full general Counsel, volition join the review, co-ordinate to the memo.

He penned the electronic mail afterwards quondam Uber engineer Susan J. Fowler published a blog mail that described an incident in which her managing director solicited sex over company chat.

"He was in an open human relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners simply he wasn't," Fowler wrote. "He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn't aid getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with."

Fowler reported the director but "was told past both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man's first criminal offence, and that they wouldn't feel comfy giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to."

Fowler was told to either switch teams or remain on the squad and hazard a poor performance review from the offending manager. She opted to switch teams, where she was successful. Simply in talking to other female employees, she constitute that "some of them had stories similar to my own.

"Some of the women even had stories nigh reporting the exact same manager I had reported, and had reported inappropriate interactions with him long before I had even joined the company. It became obvious that both HR and management had been lying about this beingness 'his first offense", and it certainly wasn't his last," she wrote. "Within a few months, he was reported once more for inappropriate behavior, and those who reported him were told information technology was still his 'start criminal offense.' The situation was escalated as far up the chain every bit information technology could exist escalated, and still nothing was washed."

The women met with 60 minutes separately; "the rep I spoke with told me that he had never been reported before," Fowler wrote. "Information technology was such a breathy lie that at that place was really zippo I could do."

Ultimately, the manager in question left the company. Simply Fowler faced other problems at the company, which she details in the blog post, and eventually took another job at Stripe.

In her blog mail service, Fowler likewise says Uber was 25 percent female when she joined, a number that dropped to less than 6 percent by the time she left the company. Of that 150 engineers on the site reliability engineer teams, iii per centum were women, she wrote.

In his memo, Kalanick said fifteen.i percent of those in engineering, production management, and scientist roles at Uber are women, which "has not changed substantively in the final year." He said this is comparable with other Silicon Valley firms, though he pledged "to publish a broader multifariousness study for the company in the coming months."

About Chloe Albanesius

Chloe Albanesius

Chloe has led PCMag's news coverage for more than ten years, editing and writing stories about the innovations that have shaped the last decade and the companies behind them. She likewise oversees the site's how-to coverage. Before joining PCMag.com, Chloe was a reporter roofing tech policy on Capitol Colina for The National Periodical'south Engineering Daily and fiscal IT for Incisive Media in NYC. She'south held internships at NBC's Run into the Press, washingtonpost.com, the Tate Gallery press part in London, Curl Call, and Congressional Quarterly. She graduated with a available'southward degree in journalism from American Academy in Washington, D.C.