Ridesharing service Uber is being investigated by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) for gender discrimination, the Wall Street Journal has reported.
WSJ, citing unnamed sources, said that probe has been going on for almost a year. It relates to pay inequality, hiring practices and other issues. The EEOC is reportedly interviewing current and former employees of the company.
During its relatively short lifespan, Uber has already seen its fair share of controversy — and discrimination accusations. Co-founder Travis Kalanick was ousted last year after reports came out that he ignored sexual harassment claims within the company. Earlier that year Susan Fowler, a former Uber engineer, wrote a lengthy blog post detailing rampant sexism at the organization.
According to Fowler, during her time at Uber, things only got worse for women:
When I joined Uber, the organization I was part of was over 25% women. By the time I was trying to transfer to another eng organization, this number had dropped down to less than 6%. Women were transferring out of the organization, and those who couldn’t transfer were quitting or preparing to quit. There were two major reasons for this: there was the organizational chaos, and there was also the sexism within the organization. When I asked our director at an org all-hands about what was being done about the dwindling numbers of women in the org compared to the rest of the company, his reply was, in a nutshell, that the women of Uber just needed to step up and be better engineers.
Luckily, Fowler secured a new job.
“On my last day at Uber, I calculated the percentage of women who were still in the org. Out of over 150 engineers in the SRE teams, only 3% were women,” she wrote.
Kalanick and other top-level executives also came under fire when a woman in India filed a lawsuit, saying she reported being raped by an Uber driver in India but that the company buried her medical records. Kalanick reportedly saw the records himself.
Dara Khosrowshahi took the helm after Kalanick’s departure. But new leadership has not been enough to change the company’s culture. In May a former employee sued Uber, citing racism, sexism and pay inequity.
Just last week Liane Hornsey, Uber’s human resources chief, resigned amid criticism of how she addressed discrimination complaints. She had been with the company for about a year and a half, joining the team just before Fowler’s scathing blog post was published.
Despite being tasked with equality at the company, Hornsey appeared to blame outside circumstances for Uber’s lack of diversity. The Los Angeles Times reported:
She also recalled that in her first meeting with Khosrowshahi, his last question was: “Liane, how are you taking diversity seriously How does the organization know you’re taking diversity seriously What are you doing for women, specifically”
But Hornsey also said that for engineering jobs, it was “bloody hard” to implement the Rooney Rule — a hiring approach that mandates employers interview at least one woman or underrepresented minority for certain positions. And though she said she had thanked Fowler publicly, she said: “I don’t know whether there would be any benefit in meeting her.” That sparked several reactions from Fowler on Twitter, who wrote that Hornsey “really, really doesn’t like me.”
Meanwhile, Barney Harford, COO, allegedly has a habit of making racially charged remarks, the New York Times reported last week. Nearly half a dozen people alleged that Harford was criticizing an ad featuring a mixed-race couple. He also confused two different Black women in the ad, supposedly because their hairstyles resembled one another. Complaints have been filed with HR, the Times reported.
But if the person heading HR is not equipped to fulfill her job requirements, where does that leave the employees
The answer: working at a company where, despite the numerous scandals and instances of broken corporate culture, leadership is almost entirely made up of white males. Seventeen percent of the team is women, and only one person is Black.
