Former Uber employee shares sexism allegations

A former software engineer from Uber claims she was a victim of sexism while she was an employee of the company, an allegation that an Uber spokesperson said the company is taking “very seriously.”

In a Medium post, Keala Lusk detailed her negative experience with an Uber manager who she alleges mistreated her and other employees.

“Unlike all of the other Uber stories I have read, I wasn’t dealing with some white guy in power. This is a woman, just like me,” Lusk wrote.

Lusk summarized a complaint she says she sent to the company’s HR department, but alleged that it was “swept under the carpet of collective Uber suffering.” In it, she claimed her manager questioned her decision to wear a tank top around a male colleague.

“I was shocked and suddenly painfully aware of my body and appearance in a way that I’ve never been at work. It made me feel humiliated, as if I shouldn’t be wearing anything to show my arms or skin. How could she say this?” Lusk wrote.

“I have never faced discrimination because of what I was wearing (which was a black tank top from DefCon) and was at a complete loss for words,” she added.

Lusk’s story is one of the latest personal testimonies alleging inappropriate behavior involving Uber employees.

Susan Fowler, a former Uber reliability engineer, wrote a testimony claiming that her complaints about being sexually harassed by a manager over online chats went unanswered.

“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,” Fowler wrote last month.

Uber later announced it was bringing on former Attorney General Eric Holder to “conduct an independent review” of the allegations.

“We take any and all allegations of this nature very seriously and have forwarded this to Attorney General Eric Holder and Tammy Albarran to include in their investigation,” an Uber spokesperson told The Hill on Friday about Lusk’s claims.

–Melanie Zanona contributed