Uber is moving fast to try and quell backlash from a damning blog post that alleged the company suffers from rampant sexism and failed at every turn to solve the issue. According to an internal email sent to Uber employees this afternoon, CEO Travis Kalanick says his company has brought on former US Attorney General Eric Holder to oversee “an independent review” of the issues raised by former employee Susan Fowler, whose blog post on Sunday about her work experience went viral and resulted in widespread outrage.
Fowler, who began working at Uber in November 2015 as a site reliability engineer, says she was subjected to sexual harassment from her manager on her very first day. She also describes in great detail how Uber’s HR department failed at virtually every step of the way to take her complaints seriously and reprimand or fire the harasser, noting how her superiors even went so far as to suggest she would be fired if she continued complaining about abuse. The #DeleteUber hashtag, which sprung up in the aftermath of Trump’s immigration ban, has already begun trending once more in response to Fowler’s post.
Holder will work with Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post and an Uber board member, alongside Uber’s HR chief Liane Hornsey and Angela Padilla, an in-house lawyer. Uber critics are already making the obvious point that a review featuring a board member, the head of HR, and an in-house lawyer is not exactly independent.
@MikeIsaac how can an independent review into HR be joined by the head of HR, an in-house lawyer, and a board member/
— ᴅᴇʀᴇᴋ ᴍᴇᴀᴅ (@derektmead) February 20, 2017
Even Holder, despite his history, is not entirely an outsider. Uber retains his law firm, Covington & Burling, for advice on safety issues. Holder even advocated for Uber last summer by sending letters to officials to drop policies mandating fingerprint-based background checks for drivers. Holder’s former chief of staff and Covington employee, Margaret Richardson, also sits on Uber’s safety advisory board.