Sexual Harassment Claims By Ex Uber Engineer

Akanksha1982 · Feb 23, 2017

Rihana, just put yourself in HR's shoes and this allegations came to you. What would you have done?
1. Promise the employee to look into the matter
2. talked to her manager
3. talked to the company lawyers
4. company lawyers talks to the manager. Lawyer says there is no merit in the case.
5. manager admits/promises to be careful in the future
6. Keep everything documented in chronological order.
7. Wait for further complaints from employee or others.
8. Make sure that employee records are well maintained. All the reviews, emails, IM chats, etc.

There is no way you can inform the employee that there is no merit in the case, or the manager should be fired for proposing. What would you have informed the employee? Nothing.

HR always meets on 1:1 basis on any HR case. The worst thing HR wants is to have a class action lawsuit.

Other women may have not joined because of personal reason (financial to keep the job).

For any type of harassment, a case happens only if it is severe or continuous or retaliatory (this is hard to prove in most cases).

In most companies, managers are required to take a mandatory harassment training every two years.

Rihana · Feb 28, 2017

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/27/technology/uber-sexual-harassment-amit-singhal-resign.html?_r=0

"Amit Singhal has left his job at Uber as its SVP of engineering because he did not disclose to the car-hailing company that he left Google a year earlier after top executives there informed him of an allegation of sexual harassment from an employee that an internal investigation had found “credible.”"

Singhal had joined Uber just last month. He was employee #176 at Google. IIT Roorkee, MS from Univ of Minnesota, PhD in Information Retrieval from Cornell, 15 years at Google, rewrote the search algorithms that founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had written. And now this!

Looks like some good came out soon enough from Susan Fowler's blogpost. Uber is forced to clean up its act. Singhal was asked to resign.

Want to give some credit here to Google that in its internal investigation found the claims against such a senior employee credible. But, what else did they do other than quietly letting him leave with a sweet farewell letter that said he wanted to focus on philanthropy.

justanothergirl · Mar 1, 2017

...here is more
Female engineer sues Tesla, describing a culture of 'pervasive harassment'

Amica · Mar 1, 2017

In this kind of situation, the company risks a lawsuit if they admit the accused is guilty. To avoid having to make a hefty payment to the complainant, they protect the accused.

Once the news dies down, they quietly let go of both parties.

In the case of the prior incident at Google, the lady decided not to pursue legal action. This allowed Google to let Singhal resign without a scandal. I believe he will "resign" from Uber without official censure.

Ultimately, it boils down to protecting the company.

.