Michael Morgenstern set out with a mission: To persuade strangers to take a ride in his car.

But he wasn’t doing it for money. Morgenstern, a filmmaker, was interested in a different kind of compensation — a quid pro quo.

The rules were simple: To get a free ride, all someone had to do was delete their Uber account.

“I’ve always had my reservations about Uber,” he said. “So, after I deleted my own Uber app, I felt like I wanted to do more. … People sometimes need a push to do the right thing. So we were going to give them that push.”

Days after engineer Susan Fowler published a blog post recounting the sexism and mistreatment she suffered during her time at Uber, the company continued to field fallout.

Customers took to social media, where the hashtag #deleteUber was trending for the second time in the last month (though App Annie, an app analytics firm, reported no major changes in downloads of Uber and its rival Lyft during the week).

Employees demanded answers during a 90-minute all-hands meeting on Tuesday, during which CEO Travis Kalanick reportedly apologized for his company’s lack of diversity and handling of employee complaints. And investors and entrepreneurs, like longtime diversity advocates and venture capitalists Mitch and Freada Kapor, called on Uber to accept responsibility and make big changes to its corporate culture.

In her blog post, Fowler, who now works at San Francisco mobile payments firm Stripe, detailed several instances of discrimination and sexual harassment, and the subsequent response — or lack thereof — from the ride-hailing app’s human resources department.

“When I joined Uber, the organization I was part of was over 25 percent women. By the time I was trying to transfer to another (engineering) organization, this number had dropped down to less than 6 percent,” Fowler wrote. “Women were transferring out of the organization, and those who couldn’t transfer were quitting or preparing to quit. There were two major reasons for this: There was the organizational chaos, and there was also the sexism within the organization. When I asked our director at an org all-hands about what was being done about the dwindling numbers of women in the org compared to the rest of the company, his reply was, in a nutshell, that the women of Uber just needed to step up and be better engineers.”

Morgenstern, 31, said he, too, was outraged by Fowler’s story.

“After all this, I’ve reached a place where if I have to pay a few extra dollars or wait a few more minutes for a ride, then you know what? That’s worth it,” Morgenstern said. “It felt like an absurd amount of privilege to not care about how a company operates or treats its people just because they might be more convenient.”

But he wanted to do more than post a photo to Facebook documenting his Uber deletion. So, he said, he decided to take his social media message on the road — literally.

Back to Gallery SF man offers free rides to passengers who #DeleteUber 4 1 of 4 Photo: Natasha Dangond, The Chronicle 2 of 4 Photo: Natasha Dangond, The Chronicle 3 of 4 Photo: Natasha Dangond, The Chronicle 4 of 4 Photo: Natasha Dangond, The Chronicle







Morgenstern and friend Ka-Ping Yee started by making a sign and putting it on the outside of their car.

“Free rides! To anywhere in the city,” the sign read. “Step 1: Uninstall Uber. Step 2: Get a free ride. #womensrights #workersrights.”

Then they hit the streets. At first, people didn’t seem too sure about the arrangement. But after some cajoling, they got their first taker: a man named Adam, who had been running through the rain, clutching a big cardboard box to his chest.

They helped walk Adam through the process of deleting his Uber account before nixing the app from his phone. As they did, they talked about sexism.

When asked on the Uber app to explain why he was deleting his account, Adam wrote “women’s rights.”

Morgenstern said though they only had time to give a handful of rides that day, they hope others will heed their call to action and offer the same deal: free rides if you delete your Uber app.

This is not the first time Uber has been the subject of a delete-your-account backlash.

Last month, social media lit up with a wave of people deleting their Uber accounts over a variety of issues after President Trump tried to bar admittance of refugees and immigrants from seven Muslim-majority nations.

In 2014, a similar push to #deleteUber struck after a top executive suggested that the app should dig up dirt on journalists who covered the company in an unflattering light.

On Friday, five days after publishing her blog post, Fowler tweeted that “research for the smear campaign has begun. If you are contacted by anyone asking for personal and intimate info about me, please report ASAP.”

Responding to Fowler’s tweet, Uber spokeswoman MoMo Zhou said: “This behavior is wrong and Uber is absolutely not involved in it.”

Uber on Monday announced it had hired former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate its corporate culture and treatment of women.

“But these problems have been ongoing for so long, it’s obviously not just one thing. It’s not a cosmetic issue,” Morgenstern said. “The problem is deep and fundamental. If Uber wants to win back the trust — and business — of its customers, I think it’s going to need to do a lot to assure people it has truly changed.”

San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Carolyn Said contributed reporting.

Marissa Lang is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mlang@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Marissa_Jae