Uber CEO to order 'urgent investigation' after harassment and bias claims
Ride-hailing company Uber Technologies was rocked at the weekend by a series of allegations of sexual harassment and gender bias, leading CEO Travis Kalanick to call for an investigation into the claims.
Author and engineer Susan Fowler, who worked for the California-based company until January of this year, wrote an account of her time there in which she detailed a variety of mismanagement and harassment allegations. The claims have not yet been verified.
Kalanick responded to Fowler's account on Twitter, vowing to fully review the accusations and deal with them appropriately.
"What she describes is abhorrent and against everything Uber stands for and believes in," Kalanick wrote. "It's the first time this has come to my attention so I have instructed Liane Hornsey our new Chief Human Resources Officer to conduct an urgent investigation into these allegations."
"We seek to make Uber a just workplace and there can be absolutely no place for this kind of behavior at Uber — and anyone who behaves this way or thinks this is OK will be fired," the CEO added.
Fowler's fiery claims included being propositioned for sex by a manager on her first day working for the company, and encountering resistance from those in HR when she reported the incident.
"On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat," Fowler wrote in her blog post. "He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn't. He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn't help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with."
"When I reported the situation, I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man's first offense, and that they wouldn't feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to."
The engineer also described the company as "an organisation in complete, unrelenting chaos" due to executives constantly competing with and against each other.
"It seemed like every manager was fighting their peers and attempting to undermine their direct supervisor so that they could have their direct supervisor's job. No attempts were made by these managers to hide what they were doing," she wrote.