Uber CEO promises 'urgent investigation' into former employee's sex harassment claims

A file photo of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. A file photo of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. Photo: TOBIAS HASE, AFP / Getty Images Photo: TOBIAS HASE, AFP / Getty Images Image 1 of / 45 Caption Close Uber CEO promises 'urgent investigation' into former employee's sex harassment claims 1 / 45 Back to Gallery

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick on Sunday announced an "urgent investigation" into detailed allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination by a former employee.

Earlier in the day, Susan Fowler, a former site reliability engineer at Uber, published a blog post explaining the allegations. They start with her first official day on her team, when she says her manager sent her a series of messages propositioning her for sex as he was an in open relationship with his girlfriend, who was having an easier time finding partners.

As he announced the investigation over Twitter, Kalanick tweeted the following: "What's described here is abhorrent & against everything we believed in. Anyone who behaves this way or thinks this is OK will be fired."

1/ What's described here is abhorrent & against everything we believe in. Anyone who behaves this way or thinks this is OK will be fired. https://t.co/6q29N7AL6E — travis kalanick (@travisk) February 20, 2017

2/ I've instructed our CHRO Liane to conduct an urgent investigation. There can be absolutely no place for this kind of behavior at Uber. — travis kalanick (@travisk) February 20, 2017

In that alleged incident and others, Fowler describes a hostile human-resources department that refused to punish the manager and suggested she might be the problem. She says other female engineers she talked to described similar issues, and that from the time she joined Uber to the time she left, the percentage of women in her engineering organization had dropped from 25 percent to 6 percent.

"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," Fowler writes.

In a final example of her "comically absurd" experiences at Uber, Fowler alleges that women were even excluded from receiving free leather jackets even though the men got them, simply because the much larger number of male jackets to order merited the company a bulk discount.