Uber CEO announces investigation following ‘abhorrent’ allegations in blog post of former employee

UBER has come under fire after a former employee revealed the “unrelenting chaos” of working for the tech company.

Ms Fowler has prompted an internal investigation at Uber after she penned an explosive blog post about her time at the company.

THE culture at popular ride sharing app Uber is in the spotlight after a shocking blog post by a former employee detailed allegations of a systematic lack of protection against sexual harassment.

Susan Fowler worked as an engineer for Uber from November 2015 until December and has revealed in a long blog post why she left the company and what her time there was like. And it’s not pretty.

Even the CEO of Uber has described the allegations as “abhorrent and against everything Uber stands for”.

Ms Fowler described the year she worked at the disruptive company as “a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story”.

She detailed alleged instances of overt sexual harassment she experienced and how the company effectively conspired to protect the person responsible.

“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,” she wrote.

She went on to detail how on her very first day her new manager sent her suggestive messages via the company chat telling her that he was in an open relationship but, unlike his partner, was having trouble finding superfluous sexual partners.

“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,” Ms Fowler wrote.

“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.”

Ms Fowler's blog post has prompted a quick response from the Uber CEO.

“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 offence, and that they wouldn’t feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning.”

As she describes it, she was basically told that she could move to a separate team but if she stayed working under the manager that she complained about, there was nothing they could do if he gave her a poor performance review.

Despite feeling like she was perfectly suited for her original role, in the end she decided to find a new team to work with.

“I remarked that this didn’t seem like much of a choice,” she wrote.

According to her, she soon found out that she wasn’t alone when it came to her complaint and the ensuing frustration she experienced with the alleged HR cover up.

“Over the next few months, I began to meet more women engineers in the company. As I got to know them, and heard their stories, I was surprised that some of them had stories similar to my own. Some of the women even had stories about reporting the exact same manager I had reported, and had reported inappropriate interactions with him long before I had even joined the company. It became obvious that both HR and management had been lying about this being ‘his first offence’, and it certainly wasn’t his last.”

Silicon Valley has become rather notorious for its “bro culture” in recent years with many companies announcing measures to attract more women.

However according to Ms Fowler, when she joined Uber, women represented 25 per cent of the organisation she worked in. On her last day, she says that number was down to about 3 per cent.

It didn’t take long for her blog post to be widely circulated, prompting a response from her former employer.

Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick said the company will “conduct an urgent investigation” into the allegations, and promised to fire anyone who “behaves this way or thinks this is OK.”

“I have just read Susan Fowler’s blog. What she describes is abhorrent and against everything Uber stands for and believes in,” he said.

“We seek to make Uber a just workplace and there can be absolutely no place for this kind of behaviour at Uber.”

The post elicited a strong reaction on social media as well.

“This is awful. I’m very sorry it happened to you. I can’t imagine how that must have felt and still feels now,” wrote Chris Sacca who is an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, and has invested heavily in Uber.

“I’m saddened to read about your experience. Thank you for sharing and remaining strong,” wrote San Francisco based start-up adviser Ron Pragides.

“OMG, just read this. Why aren’t you suing those pricks?” wrote design author Mike Monteiro.

Chief Executive Officer of Uber Travis Kalanick has issued a statement about the blog post.

1/ What's described here is abhorrent & against everything we believe in. Anyone who behaves this way or thinks this is OK will be fired. https://t.co/6q29N7AL6E

— travis kalanick (@travisk) February 20, 2017

Ms Fowler went on to detail a toxic culture at the company among senior management and “a Game of Thrones political war” among some of its top engineers.

“It was an organisation in complete, unrelenting chaos,” she said.

A number of times she tried to transfer within the company but was repeatedly blocked and claimed she had her performance reviews retroactively changed to prevent her from being eligible to transfer.

“It turned out that keeping me on the team made my manager look good, and I overheard him boasting to the rest of the team that even though the rest of the teams were losing their women engineers left and right, he still had some on his team.”

On one occasion after trying to changes roles and being refused she “went home and cried that day”.

Ms Fowler has since taken a job with online payment company Stripe and looks back on her time at Uber with a strangeness of feeling, she said.

“I feel a lot of sadness, but I can’t help but laugh at how ridiculous everything was. Such a strange experience. Such a strange year.”