Following accusations of sexism being ingrained into the culture of ride-hailing company Uber, after a female ex-employ detailed her experience in a blog post..
Following accusations of sexism being ingrained into the culture of ride-hailing company Uber, after a female ex-employ detailed her experience in a blog post earlier this week, CEO Travis Kalanick held a meeting yesterday with a group of 100+ Uber female engineers to listen to their concerns — and was told in clear terms the company has a systemic problem with sexism.
In an audio recording of the meeting, obtained by BuzzFeed , a clearly exasperated female engineer can be heard telling Kalanick there is a “systemic problem” with sexism in the company which Uber needs to address head-on.
“Can we stop saying if there’s a systemic problem here. I think it’s really important that we get there. I think for years in tech we’ve been saying if there’s a systemic problem there. And saying where’s the data to suggest that there’s a systemic problem,” she can be heard telling Kalanick.
“We have the data, we have the anecdotes, we have it happening in our own backyard. When are we going to get together and say that there is a systemic problem here — and stop using hypotheticals.”
Kalanick responds by asking whether the “starting point” is whether she believes that the two lawyers Uber has hired to interrogate claims of sexual harassment at the ride-hailing service are “going to get the truth”.
The engineer counters: “I don’t think it does start there, Travis. I think is starts before that, I think it starts with listening to your own people. And I think that over the past several years if we had already been listening to our people we would already believe this systemic problem was here.”
Uber has hired former Attorney General Eric Holder and Tammy Albarran, both partners at the law firm Covington & Burlington, conduct a review of sexual harassment claims at the ride-hailing service made by a former employee and engineer, Susan Fowler.
“I do not think that we need his help in admitting to ourselves, as a company and a family, that we have a systemic problem here,” adds the engineer — drawing a halting “fair enough, fair enough” response from Kalanick as the rest of the room breaks out into applause.
