“I still see hope and opportunity for Uber,” said Freada Kapor Klein, a partner at the venture capital firm Kapor Capital
and co-chairwoman of the Kapor Center for Social Impact, who along with her husband, the entrepreneur Mitch Kapor, are investors in Uber.
Uber Case Could Be a Watershed for Women in Tech -
Few women in Silicon Valley were surprised by the revelations about Uber detailed this month by Susan Fowler, a software engineer who published an exposé on the culture of sexism and sexual harassment
that she said she battled during her year at the ride-hailing company.
This week, The Guardian reported that a female Tesla employee had filed suit against the electric-car company for what she called “pervasive harassment.” (Tesla said in a statement
that the claims “have not been substantiated.”) And even in cases where abuse is well documented — as in Ellen Pao’s unsuccessful sexual harassment lawsuit against the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers — the men responsible are rarely punished, and the overall picture rarely improves.
“The word among women engineers I talk to is that Uber is the epitome of bro-grammer culture.”
But precisely for those reasons, Ms. Kapor Klein argued
that if Uber mounted an honest investigation into its culture and pledged to transparently remake what ails it, it could become a model for the industry.
“Left-leaning Silicon Valley has been embracing the Women’s March and had this heightened awareness about issues
that women face due to misogynistic men,” said Karen Catlin, a former software engineer who is now an advocate for women in the tech industry.
Ms. Kapor Klein said that Uber was well known in the tech industry for its unfriendliness to women.
Finally, Ms. Kapor Klein said, she would be scrutinizing Mr. Kalanick’s own actions.
