{"id":666,"date":"2017-02-20T16:11:00","date_gmt":"2017-02-20T16:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.metronewsng.online\/2017\/02\/uber-investigating-sexual-harassment-claims-by-ex-employee.html\/"},"modified":"2017-02-20T16:11:00","modified_gmt":"2017-02-20T16:11:00","slug":"uber-investigating-sexual-harassment-claims-by-ex-employee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/uber-investigating-sexual-harassment-claims-by-ex-employee\/","title":{"rendered":"Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n<\/div>\n
\nThe
\n chief executive of Uber on Sunday opened an internal investigation into
\n claims of sexual harassment made by a former engineer at the company.<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nThe
\n engineer, Susan Fowler, said that she was sexually harassed by her
\ndirect supervisor during her time at Uber and that after she reported
\nthose claims to the human resources department, they were ignored. She
\ngave her account in a lengthy post on her personal blog on Sunday.<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\n\u201cIt
\n was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was
\n so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these
\nchat messages and reported him to HR,\u201d Ms. Fowler wrote. <\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\n\u201cUpper
\nmanagement told me that he \u2018was a high performer\u2019 (i.e. had stellar
\nperformance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn\u2019t feel
\ncomfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake
\n on his part.\u201d<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nMs. Fowler left Uber in December and this year joined Stripe, a payments processing start-up.<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nMs.
\n Fowler\u2019s account is another sign of Silicon Valley\u2019s struggle with
\nwomen\u2019s issues and diversity in a male-dominated engineering
\nenvironment. In 2015, the venture capital world was put under the
\nmicroscope when Ellen Pao, a former partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield
\n& Byers, claimed in a lawsuit that she was discriminated against at
\nthe blue-chip venture firm because of her gender \u2014 a case she lost.<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nMs.
\n Fowler\u2019s story is particularly resonant because of Uber\u2019s reputation
\nfor having an intense workplace culture with high turnover.<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nHours
\n after Ms. Fowler\u2019s post, Travis Kalanick, Uber\u2019s chief executive, said
\nit was the first time the issue had come to his attention. He said he
\nhad instructed Liane Hornsey, the company\u2019s recently hired chief of
\nhuman resources, \u201cto conduct an urgent investigation into these
\nallegations.\u201d<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nMr.
\n Kalanick said in an emailed statement: \u201cWhat she describes is abhorrent
\n and against everything Uber stands for and believes in. We seek to make
\n Uber a just workplace for everyone, and there can be absolutely no
\nplace for this kind of behavior at Uber \u2014 and anyone who behaves this
\nway or thinks this is O.K. will be fired.\u201d<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nIn
\n a Twitter post on Sunday, Arianna Huffington, the business mogul and a
\nboard member at Uber, solicited feedback from employees and said she
\nwould work with Ms. Hornsey to support the investigation.<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nMessages sent to Ms. Fowler over email and Twitter were not immediately answered on Sunday.<\/div>\n
\nUber
\n recently faced a backlash when Mr. Kalanick agreed to join President
\nTrump\u2019s economic advisory council. The matter reached a fever pitch
\naround the time of Mr. Trump\u2019s travel ban against seven predominantly
\nMuslim countries, and hundreds of thousands of people deleted their Uber
\n accounts from their phones in protest of the company.<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nAfter the outcry, Mr. Kalanick eventually stepped down from Mr. Trump\u2019s council.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The chief executive of Uber on Sunday opened an internal investigation into claims of sexual harassment made by a former engineer at the company. The engineer, Susan Fowler, said that she was sexually harassed by her direct supervisor during her time at Uber and that after she reported those claims to the human resources department, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":46784,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-default"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=666"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}