In response to a blog post by former Uber engineer Susan Fowler in which she detailed claims of sexual harassment, CEO Travis Kalanick sent an email to his employees regarding an investigation into what she described.
In the memo, obtained by The New York Times, Kalanick wrote that an independent review of Fowler’s claims will be overseen by Eric Holder, who served as U.S. Attorney General in the Obama administration, as well as Tammy Albarran. Both are partners at the law firm Covington & Burling.
Arianna Huffington, who became Uber’s first woman board member in April 2016, Liane Hornsey, who has been the company’s chief human resources officer since November 2016, and Angela Padilla, Uber’s associate general counsel, will all have a role in conducting the investigation. Kalanick wrote that they would be “doing smaller group and one-on-one listening sessions to get [employee] feedback directly.”
Fowler, who worked at Uber for a year, wrote in her blog post, “When I joined Uber, the organization I was part of was over 25 percent women. … On my last day at Uber, I calculated the percentage of women who were still in the org. Out of over 150 engineers in the SRE teams, only 3 percent were women.”
In his email, Kalanick addressed the issue of gender diversity at Uber “If you look across our engineering, product management and scientist roles, 15.1 percent of employees are women and this has not changed substantively in the last year.”
He cited Facebook’s 17 percent of women employees, Google’s 18 percent and Twitter’s 10 percent as points of reference, and he said that he and Hornsey were working toward publishing a more comprehensive diversity report over the next few months.
Kalanick closed his email with a broad statement. “What is driving me through all of this is a determination that we take what’s happened as an opportunity to…