Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has ordered an “urgent investigation” into claims made by a former employee about sexual harassment and institutional indifference within the company.
In a blog post, Susan Fowler, a former site reliability engineer who resigned from Uber in December, revealed that she was subjected to sexual harassment through a ‘string of messages’ over the company’s chat software.
“What she describes is abhorrent and against everything Uber stands for and believes in,” CEO Travis Kalanick tweeted on Sunday, and said that he has asked Uber’s Chief Human Resources Officer Liane Hornsey to carry out an urgent investigation.
Susan Flower joined Uber in 2016 and was serving at Uber’s San Francisco office. She revealed that on her first day on the team, her manager made sexual advances over the company chat service.
“It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR,” she said.
According to Fowler, Human Resources told her that the person “was a high performer” and that management would not be comfortable in “giving him anything other than a warning”.
“Uber was a pretty good-sized company at that time, and I had pretty standard expectations of how they would handle situations like this. I expected that I would report him to HR, they would handle the situation appropriately, and then life would go on – unfortunately, things played out quite a bit differently. 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. Upper management told me that he “was a high performer” (i.e. had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn’t feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part.”
“I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or (ii) I could stay on the team, but I would have to understand that he would most likely give me a poor performance review when review time came around, and there was nothing they could do about that. I remarked that this didn’t seem like much of a choice, and that I wanted to stay on the team because I had significant expertise in the exact project that the team was struggling to complete (it was genuinely in the company’s best interest to have me on that team), but they told me the same thing again and again. One HR rep even explicitly told me that it wouldn’t be retaliation if I received a negative review later because I had been “given an option”. I tried to escalate the situation but got nowhere with either HR or with my own management chain (who continued to insist that they had given him a stern-talking to and didn’t want to ruin his career over his “first offense”).”
“So I left that team, and took quite a few weeks learning about other teams before landing anywhere (I desperately wanted to not have to interact with HR ever again). I ended up joining a brand-new SRE team that gave me a lot of autonomy, and I found ways to be happy and do amazing work. In fact, the work I did on this team turned into the production-readiness process which I wrote about in my bestselling (!!!) book Production-Ready Microservices.”
Arianna Huffington, who became a member of Uber’s board last year, said she would work with Hornsey in the investigation.
Kalanick, in an Uber statement, said there is no place for this kind of behavior at Uber and that “anyone who behaves this way or thinks this is OK will be fired”.
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