Company has been taking steps to change culture following scandals that appeared to demonstrate aggressive business practices and a toxic workplace

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Uber has fired more than 20 employees after a company investigation into sexual harassment claims and workplace culture.

The terminations were announced at a company-wide meeting on Tuesday, details of which were first leaked to and reported by the New York Times and Bloomberg News. Uber confirmed the departures to the Guardian.

The identities of the terminated employees have not been revealed, although the Guardian has learned that some senior executives were among them.

The terminations follow an investigation carried out by the law firm Perkins Coie in the wake of allegations of sexual harassment made by Susan Fowler, a former Uber engineer who published a viral account of sexual harassment and discrimination at the company.

Fowler, who worked for Uber from November 2015 to December 2016, outlined in a blogpost allegations including claims that her manager propositioned her for sex when she joined and that a director explained the dwindling numbers of women in her organization by saying “the women of Uber just needed to step up and be better engineers”.

She also described a “comically absurd” case of discrimination in which her organization promised leather jackets for everyone, but decided not to order them for women “because there were not enough women in the organization to justify placing an order”.

When she complained, the roughly six women involved “were told that if we wanted leather jackets, we women needed to find jackets that were the same price as the bulk-order price of the men’s jackets”, she wrote.

Travis Kalanick, Uber’s CEO, said at the time: “What she describes is abhorrent and against everything Uber stands for and believes in.”

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The day after Fowler’s claims came to light, Uber created an anonymous hotline for staff to report incidents of sexual harassment, discrimination, bullying and unprofessional behavior.

Perkins Coie looked into 215 claims made through the hotline – the majority of which were raised by team members in San Francisco – and took no action in 100 instances. Acting on the law firm’s recommendations, Uber’s human resources team fired “more than 20” employees.

“I have never in my career heard of groups of people being terminated for sexual harassment like this,” said Leslie Miley, a veteran software engineer who now works at Slack, who interviewed at Uber in 2015 and was put off by the culture.



“It points to a much bigger problem. How do you end up with that many people reporting sexual harassment and having to bring in an outside firm to handle it? What the hell has your HR department been doing?”

Uber has been taking steps to change company culture following a series of scandals that appeared to demonstrate aggressive business practices and a toxic work environment.

In addition to allegations of sexual harassment, these include a video of Kalanick berating an Uber driver, a legal battle with Google over the alleged theft of driverless car technology, the revelation that Uber used secret “Greyball” software to deceive city regulators, and allegations that the company had another program called “Hell” designed to spy on its arch-rival, Lyft.

Several high-profile employees have left the embattled company in recent months, including the policy and communications vice-president, Rachel Whetstone, and Jeff Jones, Kalanick’s second-in-command, who left the company over what he described as disagreements with leadership. Last week the company revealed that its chief financial officer, Gautam Gupta, was also leaving.



Last month, Uber’s head of human resources, Liane Hornsey, said in an interview that despite the string of allegations, sexual harassment wasn’t a problem for the company.

“[Fowler’s] blog shocked me,” Hornsey told USA Today. “But what did surprise me was when I did the listening sessions, this didn’t come up as an issue. It wasn’t one of our big themes. Other things came up that are in that area, that our values are masculine and a little aggressive, but the harassment issue, I just didn’t find that at all.”

For Miley, the timing of Hornsey’s comments raise a red flag.

“Just three weeks ago, the company’s head of HR said it wasn’t an issue and now they reveal they’ve had 100-plus incidents. So what constitutes an issue, then? It’s a very poorly timed and crafted statement,” he said.

Uber has also hired the former US attorney general, Eric Holder, and his law firm, Covington & Burling, to carry out a separate investigation into the company’s broader culture, corporate values and governance. The findings of that investigation will be made public next week.