Category: gender

Practices pertaining to gender including sexual harassment and assault

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Board member mocked women talking at Uber all-hands

Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped (p. 331) reports tense discussions as Uber’s Board of Directors summarized the Holder Report and changes to Uber’s governance. After Arianna Huffington announced a woman joining Uber’s board, board member David Bonderman remarked “I’ll tell you what it shows. It’s that it’s much likelier to be more talking on the board.”  Isaac says “the room froze” and attendees perceived that “one of Uber’s board members [had] just made a sexist comment about women talking too much.”

Travis Kalanick, long in dispute with Bonderman, took this opportunity to have Bonderman removed from the Board. (Isaac p. 332-335)

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Fallout from Fawler report of toxic culture

Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped (p. 270) describes the response to ex-employee Susan Fawler’s blog about her experience at Uber:

Of all the scandals Uber had suffered to date, this Fowler memo struck the company the hardest. Chat rooms were in chaos. Email chains to leadership from angry employees were filled with demands and more allegations. Fowler’s memo was just the beginning. Her post had burst open a dam, through which now flowed a river of pent-up employee complaints, years in the making. Worse, for Travis, employees began airing some of their bad Uber experiences in public, on Twitter.

“This is outrageous and awful. My experience with Uber HR was similarly callous & unsupportive,” tweeted Chris Messina, another Uber employee who had recently left the company. “In Susan’s case, it was reprehensible.”

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No jackets for female employees

Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped (p. 268) describes an Uber team that was buying leather jackets for employees.  With 120 men, they could get a group discount on mens’ jackets — but no such discount was available for the 6 women on the team.  As a result, the team didn’t buy jackets for its six female members.

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Thailand manager assaulted employee and pushed her face into drugs

Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped (p. 240) describes a toxic workplace at Uber in Thailand, including drug use and visits from sex workers.  He continues:

One particularly raucous evening, a bunch of Uber Thailand employees were up late drinking and snorting coke, a semiregular occurrence at that office. One female Uber employee with the group had decided she didn’t want to do drugs with her colleagues, and tried to abstain. Before she could leave, her manager grabbed the woman and shook her, bruising her. Then he grabbed the back of her head and shoved her face-first into the pile of cocaine on the table, forcing her to snort the drugs in front of them.

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Uber employee feared rape, and manager offered company health care, not help

Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped (p. 240) describes an experience of a female employee in Malaysia who noticed men following her from work, leading her to fear she would be raped.  She texted multiple people seeking help, including her manager, the local Uber general manager.  Rather than rush to the scene or call the police, the manager texted: “Don’t worry, Uber has great health care. We will pay for your medical bills.”

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Drug traffickers and prostitutes used Uber with stolen credit card numbers

Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped (p. 182) reports drug traffickers and prostitutes using Uber for local transportation — and not even paying for it.

In Brooklyn, … credit card thieves used stolen card numbers to run drug trafficking and prostitution rings using Uber vehicles. The ruse was simple: the dealers would buy stolen credit card numbers from the Dark Web, then plug those numbers into the app to charge Uber trips to the stolen accounts. Over hundreds of trips per week they delivered drugs and call girls throughout New York City–all paid by Uber incentives or through chargebacks from credit card companies after the original card owners reported the fraud.

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“Incredibly hot chicks” as drivers

Uber France offered a promotion that asked “Who said women don’t know how to drive?”, then offered rides with “Avions de chasse” — French slang for attractive women (roughly, “hot chicks”).  In admitting the problem, Uber tweeted that “we misjudged the situation” in offering this promotion.

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