Uber has launched an "urgent investigation" after a former employee wrote a blog alleging sexual harassment and sexism at the company.

Susan Fowler, who worked as an engineer at the firm until the end of 2016, claims her manager made sexual advances shortly after she joined the San Francisco-based company in 2015.

She claims her subsequent complaint hurt her career prospects at the company.

Uber chief executive Travis Kalanick said: "What's described here is abhorrent and against everything we believe in.

"Anyone who behaves this way or thinks this is OK will be fired.


"I've instructed our Chief Human Resources Officer Liane Hornsey to conduct an urgent investigation. There can be absolutely no place for this kind of behaviour at Uber."

In her blog post, Ms Fowler says that when she complained, she was told that the manager - a "high performer" - would not be moved.

She said she was given the choice of joining another team, or staying in her position, with the possibility of receiving a poor performance review from her manager.

Image: Uber says 'there's no place for this kind of behaviour'

Ms Fowler said that in subsequent months she met other women engineers at the company who said they had also experienced similar harassment, including allegedly from her previous manager.

After lodging a string of complaints, she said she was told she was "on thin ice" for reporting her boss to human resources.

The HR department also told her she might be the problem, not the man she was reporting, she claims.

She says she was blocked for a transfer and given a negative performance review without justification.

In the blog, Ms Fowler also says the team she was on was promised leather jackets as a reward for their good work - but the director of engineering later decided the jackets would only be given to male engineers because there were too few women to qualify for a bulk purchase discount.

MS Fowler said in her blog that she left Uber in December to join payments company Stripe a month later.