A former female Uber engineer's blog post went viral after stating her experience of sexual harassment during her stay at the taxi service company. The allegations are fired against the management ranks of Uber, in which CEO Travis Kalanick responded that an urgent investigation be made regarding the issue.
On her blog, Susan J. Fowler, a site reliability engineer, said that she experienced institutional sexism in the company. She worked in Uber from November 2015 to December 2016. Aside from the sexual harassment, Fowler is resentful with the management's discrimination against female employees.
She said that her manager asked her for sex over the company chat. This was evidently sexual harassment which led to her asking help from the human resource department. However, the HR responded by doing so little if anything, stating that that was the manager's first offense, and that he is a "good" worker that it would be unfitting to have a word with him, Ars Technica reported.
Later, Fowler found out that she isn't the first victim of sexual harassment, and that the management has been observed to be exercising sexism within their ranks. On a different occasion, Fowler said that the company bought more than 120 leather jackets for male employees, while never did for six women. When they asked for female leather jackets, the director said that they should find leather jackets for women that can be bought the same price as the bulk order for men, Business Insider reported.
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick expressed his concern over the blog post. He promised that an investigation be urgently made, starting off with a company-wide memo released on Monday. On Kalanick's blog post, he said that he already told Lian Hornsey, the new Chief Human Resources Officer to do investigations about the allegation of sexual harassment and sexism, saying that such behaviour is "abhorrent and against everything Uber stands for and believes in."
