Over the past year or so Uber has struggled to address issues of sexism and gender parity, with reports of harassment and discrimination making the wrong kind of headlines for the business. It is with this in mind that Uber has annouunced a three year partnership with Girls Who Code, the national nonprofit organization working to close the gender gap in technology.
As part of the partnership, Uber will give $1.2 million to Girls Who Code over the next three years, which will help grow hundreds of after school and immersion programs — and allow an additional 60,000 girls from communities across the US to be exposed to technical skills from an early age.
Uber employees from across the company, including the “LadyEng” internal group made up of women (and men!) in technical roles at Uber, will soon begin volunteering, setting up coding workshops, and mentorship programs at local Girls Who Code chapters across the country.
“We’re thrilled to collaborate with organizations like Girls Who Code to build a truly diverse and inclusive tech community. We’ll continue to invest in organizations like this as part of our $3 million diversity fund in the coming years.”
Uber and Diversity and Gender Parity
Uber is a company that has had a lot of issues recently, and has not favoured well. Earlier this year Uber released the results of a Perkins Coie LLP investigation into 215 employees accused of harassment. As a result of that probe, about 100 employees have been dismissed from those claims. But 20 were fired, another 57 are still under investigation, 31 are in some type of counseling or training and seven have received a written warning. That being said they did fare better in diversity issues witrh their latest diversity report lists a 12,000-person Uber workforce that’s 8.8 percent black and 5.6 percent Latino.
The report released in late March represented the first time a major tech company has provided diversity numbers showing black employees in greater numbers than Latinos. This may not seem like a great step but it’s also wotrth noting it’s also the first time a company’s black employee share has passed 5 %. Whilst still not as representative as we would like it is closer to the figure of 13 percent of black people in the US population. Uber’s percentage of Latino employees is also better than that of other tech companies. Uber’s workforce is considerably more diverse than at Google, where 2 percent of employees are black and 3 percent are Latino, or at Facebook, where 2 percent of staffers are black and 4 percent are Latino.
They are doing well at diversity, and have recently employed a new CEO to get them outt of the position they are in at the momen, so lets hope this is the beginning of a new era in which talk of harassment disappear and there is more equality throughout the business.
