Engineering news
Uber’s chief executive Travis Kalanick has asked the senior vice president of engineering to resign.
The allegations against Singhal
were first reported by technology website Recode. They surfaced at an especially bad time for Uber, following a week-long media frenzy, triggered when a former Uber engineer
published a blog post that detailed wide-spread sexual harassment at the car-hailing firm and a rather toxic corporate culture, where managers sabotaged each other’s work in order to promote their own careers.
The engineer, Susan Fowler, described an HR team that failed to investigate her complaints and claimed that the sexual advances by senior engineers were “one-off” incidents; Fowler, however, described that she soon found out that numerous women had been harassed by these men, and that all these incidents had been flagged to HR.
Fowler’s post received wide-spread coverage, which got several of Uber’s board members and investors involved, and renewed a campaign from some Uber-users to delete the company’s app.
Fowler isn’t by far the first female engineer who has been sexually harassed in a technology, male-dominated firm. "It's all about the right company culture, and people running any company, especially one where women are a minority, should establish a culture where employees feel safe," says Helen Wollaston, chief executive of WISE (Women into Science and Engineering), a group that campaigns to get more women interested in STEM.
"There are not that many women in technology companies as we'd like to see - and if we'd like to keep them there and encourage more women to join, it has to be made clear that this kind of behaviour is not acceptable, and that there will be consequences for people who step out of line." Employees should feel safe flagging sexual harassment up, she adds, without any fear of negative consequences for themselves.
Singhal left Google in February 2016, after a 15-year career there – seemingly amicably. But Recode’s Kara Swisher
found out that there was more to his departure than was publicly known. “According to multiple sources and internal notes read to me, after discussing the claims of an alleged encounter between Singhal and a female employee first with former Google HR head Laszlo Bock and also Google CEO Sundar Pichai in late 2015, he denied those claims at the time,” she reported. “He also apparently stated a number of times that there were two sides to every story.”
Singhal resigned after the Christmas break, while sources quoted by Swisher claim that Google was prepared to fire him after investigating the incident.
The engineer himself strongly denies any allegations. In a statement he says that “harassment is unacceptable in any setting. I certainly want everyone to know that I do not condone and have not committed such behavior.”
Last week, famous Uber investors Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein wrote
an open letter to the company, in which they voiced their frustration and disappointment with how Uber had handled the claims of sexual harassment at the firm.
Uber’s reputation was further called into question when reports emerged that friends and relatives of Fowler had been approached by researchers to uncover potentially damaging personal and intimate details about her; Fowler
described it as the start of the “research for the smear campaign” against her.
Uber, meanwhile, is trying to contain any reputational damage. In a staff meeting on 21 Feb., Kalanick apologised for insufficient diversity in the company’s workforce. The company also announced that it had hired former US attorney general Eric Holder to investigate the internal handling of sexual harassment allegations. He will be working together with the media mogul Arianna Huffington, a member of Uber’s board of directors, and Tammy Albarran, a partner at Holder’s law firm Covington and Burling.