Surprise! Uber Workforce Skews Heavily White, Male
Uber today followed in the footsteps of other major companies and released its first diversity report, which illuminates a lack of diversity at the company.
As it stands, Uber's workforce is largely white and Asian men, especially among those in tech and leadership roles. Just 15.4 percent of the company's tech staffers are female, while only 2.1 percent are Hispanic and 1 percent are black. Uber's diversity problem is perhaps most apparent when looking at the makeup of its tech leadership team, which is 88.7 percent male and entirely white or Asian.
Uber's operations and administrative (aka "non-tech") teams are more diverse: 44.4 percent female, 15.2 percent black, and 8.5 percent Hispanic. The same is true for the company's customer support team, which is 49.7 percent female, 33.5 percent black, and 15.2 percent Hispanic. Uber's report does not include stats on drivers, as company classifies them as independent contractors.
"Of course, we need to do better and have much more work to do," Uber's Chief Human Resources Officer Liane Hornsey wrote in a blog post. "But we've made some strides in diversifying our workforce: last year, 41 percent of new employees were women, which is 5 percent more than the proportion of women in our overall employee population. Similarly, we hired 3 percent more Black and 2 percent more Hispanic employees compared to our overall employee base."
Alongside its report, Uber announced plans to donate $3 million over the next three years to "support organizations working to bring more women and underrepresented groups into tech."
The report comes after former Uber engineer Susan J. Fowler last month posted a scathing blog post describing a culture of sexism and sexual harassment at the company. Among other claims, Fowler said a male manager solicited sex over company chat, and was only given a "stern stalking-to." Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has pledged to "conduct an independent review" into allegations that upper management at the company ignored incidents of sexual harassment.
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.