Uber chief orders probe into allegations of sexual harassment

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has ordered a probe into allegations of sexual harassment made by a former female employee of the company in the US against her supervisor.
Kalanick said he has instructed Liane Hornsey, the company's recently hired chief of human resources, "to conduct an urgent investigation".
"There can be absolutely no place for this kind of behaviour at Uber. What's described here is abhorrent & against everything we believe in. Anyone who behaves this way or thinks this is OK will be fired," Kalanick said in a Twitter post yesterday.
Kalanick's response came after the company's former female employer said in a blog post that her manager had sent inappropriate messages to her.

The employee had joined Uber as a site reliability engineer in November 2015. She wrote in the blog post that "things started getting weird" a few weeks after she joined her team.
"On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn't," she said.

"He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn't help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with. It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR," she said.

She said the company's Human Resource department and upper management were not supportive when she reported the situation to them.
She alleged that even though the management felt it was "clearly sexual harassment" and the manager was "propositioning" her, they did not take action as "it was this man's first offense, and that they wouldn't feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to".
"Upper management told me that he 'was a high performer' (i.E. Had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn't feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part," she said.

Media mogul and a board member at Uber Arianna Huffington also took to Twitter to say she had spoken to Kalanick about the allegations and "as a representative of Uber's Board I will work with Liane to conduct a full independent investigation starting now".