Last month Uber, the company known for ridesharing, released its workforce diversity numbers revealing an average (among the tech sector) amount of women and minority representation across the organization. The numbers did little to condemn or promote the company, but, the fact that the corporation decided to release the report is a slight room for positive change.
The low bar set for the company began in 2017 when it was revealed that sexual harassment and sexism was running rampant inside the organization. “After lengthy internal investigations, its co-founder Travis Kalanick was pushed out as CEO in June.” The murky issue would not stop there as afterwards, when the company tried to make amends by donating money to organizations inside the field of diversity, they were refused.
AnitaB.org, previously known as the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, cut its partnership with Uber last May over the high-profile allegations of sexism at the company. Several months later, another nonprofit — Black Girls Code — rebuffed Uber’s $125,000 grant offer.
According to CNN, the report covered the companies global workforce from March 2017 to March 2018, revealing that 18% of its technical workforce are women, in line with Facebook which touts about 19%. In addition, black tech works make up 2.6% of Uber’s workforce, up from 1% and larger than Facebook’s 1%. “Overall, 8.1% of Uber’s workforce is made up of black workers — down from 8.8%. The company’s EEO-1 report, which it also released, looks at its US workforce from December 2016 to December 2017. As Uber added nearly 3,500 U.S. employees, the percentage of women employed jumped from about 30% to 33%, the report indicated.”
Uber says that they are looking for more ways to improve, including reworking its position descriptions to be more inclusive, providing affinity groups to under represented populations, and targeting leadership roles as a point to increase diversity. Currently women in leadership represent 20%.
Although, no targets or goals have been given Uber is assuring the public that they are doing everything they can to make their workplace more inclusive. As the company looks to go public in 2019, they will most certainly need to move forward while under a very sharp microscope.
