Uber Hires Former Attorney-General Eric Holder to Review Sexual-Harassment Claims

[FrodosNewPet]

Uber Hires Former Attorney-General Eric Holder to Review Sexual-Harassment Claims

http://time.com/4676521/uber-sexual-harassment-eric-holder/

Subrat Patnaik | Feb 21, 2017 2:52 AM EST

Uber has hired former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to conduct a review of sexual harassment claims at the ride-hailing service made by a former employee.

Holder and Tammy Albarran, who are partners at the law firm Covington & Burling, will look into the complaints about a manager at Uber , as well as general questions about diversity and inclusion, Chief Executive Travis Kalanick told his employees in a memo on Monday that was seen by Reuters.

~ snip ~

Susan Fowler, the former Uber employee who complained of being the target of sexual harassment by her manager, wrote in a blog post on Sunday that when she reported the offense to human resources officials and management, they declined to punish the alleged offender because he "was a high performer" and that this was his first offense."

Fowler also said, after speaking with other female employees, she realized that both HR and management had been lying about this being the manager's "first offense."

~ snip ~

[FrodosNewPet]

1. Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber

https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber

Susan J. Fowler | Feb 19, 2017

As most of you know, I left Uber in December and joined Stripe in January. I've gotten a lot of questions over the past couple of months about why I left and what my time at Uber was like. It's a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in my mind, so here we go.

I joined Uber as a site reliability engineer (SRE) back in November 2015, and it was a great time to join as an engineer. They were still wrangling microservices out of their monolithic API, and things were just chaotic enough that there was exciting reliability work to be done. The SRE team was still pretty new when I joined, and I had the rare opportunity to choose whichever team was working on something that I wanted to be part of.

After the first couple of weeks of training, I chose to join the team that worked on my area of expertise, and this is where things started getting weird. On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. 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. 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.

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.

~ snip ~

[FrodosNewPet]

2. New Uber offense alienates more people the company needs

New Uber offense alienates more people the company needs

http://www.chicagotribune.com/bluesky/originals/ct-uber-talent-chicago-bsi-20170221-story.html

Amina Elahi | Feb 21, 2017 6:28 PM

After a former engineer said she had been sexually harassed and discriminated against while working at the company, some riders who had been on the fence finally decided to #DeleteUber.

But Uber also may have alienated another key group: talent the company needs to improve its culture.

Susan Fowler Rigetti said she repeatedly reported a litany of offenses she endured as an employee, but that officials dismissed her complaints and later punished her for sharing them.

~ snip ~

[klook]

3. Uber CEO orders 'urgent' investigation after sex harassment allegations

by Julia Horowitz @juliakhorowitz February 19, 2017: 10:08 PM ET

Uber said it's opening an "urgent investigation" after a former employee made public allegations of sexism and harassment at the company. Susan Fowler, an engineer who published a blog post on Sunday detailing her experience at Uber, claimed the company refused to do more than issue a warning to a superior after she and other women complained about sexual harassment. Fowler wrote that she was blamed after making a number of reports detailing gender discrimination. Another superior threatened to fire her for bringing her concerns to human resources, Fowler wrote.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, in a statement issued several hours after Fowler's post, said that what Fowler described "is abhorrent and against everything Uber stands for and believes in." ..."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," Kalanick said. ...Uber is taking heat online over Fowler's post. The #DeleteUber hashtag has been revived; it was trending several weeks ago after Uber's initial response to President Trump's immigration ban.

Uber investor Jason Calacanis responded to the controversy, saying in a tweet that what Fowler described is "not acceptable."

More: http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/19/technology/uber-harassment-investigation/?iid=EL

Can't believe this thread hasn't gotten more traction!

[demtenjeep]

4. heard about this from the David Pakman show

I don't use Uber so I never thought about worrying about safety. I will say I have taken a couple cab rides that were uncomfortable