Former US law chief leads Uber probe

Image source, Getty Images

Image caption, Uber said it would publish diversity figures in the 'coming months'
  • Author, Dave Lee
  • Role, North America technology reporter

On Sunday we learned that Uber was going to conduct an investigation into claims of serious sexual harassment, following a from a former employee.

On Monday Uber boss Travis Kalanick sent an email to his employees with more information about the probe - and further plans the company has to address the issue.

鈥淚t鈥檚 been a tough 24 hours,鈥 he began, adding that the company was 鈥渉urting鈥.

The investigation will be lead by former US attorney general Eric Holder, who served under President Obama between 2009 and 2015, and Tammy Albarran - both partners at law firm Covington and Burling.

Arianna Huffington, best known for being the founder of the Huffington Post, will also help carry out the review. Ms Huffington has been on Uber鈥檚 board since April last year. Also conducting the review will be Uber鈥檚 new head of human resources, Liane Hornsey, and Angela Padilla, Uber鈥檚 associate general counsel.

Diversity figures

After coming into widespread criticism for never having published statistics on diversity at the company, Mr Kalanick said he would deliver figures in the "coming months". He said that of the employees working as engineers, product managers or data scientists, 15.1% are women - a number which he said hadn鈥檛 changed significantly in the past year.

鈥淎s points of reference,鈥 he wrote, 鈥淔acebook is at 17%, Google at 18% and Twitter at 10%.鈥

Until now, Uber had been standing firm on not publishing its diversity figures. Most major technology companies make public their EEO-1 - a government filing that breaks down employees by race, religion, gender and other factors.

Uber has not specified if it will publish its entire EEO-1, or just post select figures from the company.

In her blog post, Susan Fowler cited anecdotal figures of women leaving Uber in droves.

Speaking specifically about the site reliability engineering team, which she worked on for a year, she said that by the time she left, 鈥渙ut of over 150 engineers in the SRE teams, only 3% were women鈥. She now works at San Francisco-based payment firm Stripe.

Uber said it would be holding an 鈥渁ll hands" meeting on Tuesday to tell its employees what its 鈥渘ext steps鈥 will be.

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