An ex Uber engineer has recently brought to light a string of sexual harassment and discrimination incidents which took place inside the company, through a blog post on February 19.
Susan Fowler, through her post, mentions incidents wherein her seniors in the organisation repeatedly discriminated against the female employees of the company.
She mentions how during her first day in the team, she was openly propositioned for sex by her manager. As the manager was rated a ‘high performer’ in the company, the senior officials never took any action against him. They replied to her complaint declaring it as a ‘first offence’ and that it was "probably just an innocent mistake on his part.”
Susan later found out that other female co-workers had also gone through the same harassment by the manager and had been given the same reply by the seniority.
Such similar incidents were always ignored in the company, she mentions.
Fowler later had to shift to a new SRE team after such incidents were reported to the highest of authorities and still no action was being taken by the manager.Also read: Watch Video: SpaceX Lands Its Reusable Falcon 9 Rocket After Launch From Historic NASA Launchpad
She also writes about a "game-of-thrones political war" which was raging within the higher ranks of the company. Managers were in constant struggle to gain their superior’s position and as a result, many projects were abandoned, impossible deadlines were put in place and practically no work was being done.
On one occasion, Fowler was dropped out of a Stanford CS graduate program for which she was eligible based on her performance score. This happened after her performance review was wrongly and negatively marked after two successful official performance reviews.
Her requests to be transferred to other engineering organisations were also rejected multiple times because of unsubstantiated reasons, as she claims.
This blog post can come as a huge blow to the company which is already facing public outrage from Anti-Trump protestors.
Many users had deleted the app during this protest which then forced Uber CEO, Travis Kalanick to drop out of Donald Trump’s advisory council.
Susan Fowler has now left the company and is working at a technology company named Stripe. She recalls that while she was leaving, of the 150 engineers working in her team, only 3 percent were women.
The blog prompted Travis Kalanick to respond through Twitter. His tweets mention an urgent investigation being placed into the matter, headed by the Chief Human Resource Officer at Uber and state “There can be absolutely no place for this kind of behavior at Uber.”
An Uber board member, Arianna Huffington took responsibility of the investigation by tweeting “Just talked w/ Travis & as a representative of Uber's Board I will work w/Liane to conduct a full independent investigation starting now.” Also read: Donald Trump Trolled on Twitter for Garbled Remarks
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