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As a shock to absolutely no one, Uber is mostly pasty, male at the top

Rain is wet, sky is blue, Oracle is expensive, etc

Uber has published its first ever diversity report today, revealing that the car-hailing biz is, unsurprisingly, dominated by white males like most major American technology companies.

The ride-sharing app maker has been hit by a series of scandals highlighting a toxic corporate culture steeped in sexual harassment, leadership issues and legal spats. After facing mounting pressure from a scathing blog post written by ex-Uber employee Susan Fowler detailing her experience with sexism, the company decided to publish its diversity figures.

The report published on Tuesday shows that women make up just over a third of the company, at 36.1 per cent. The numbers get worse when looking at tech-related roles, where the percentage of women drops by more than half to a meagre 15.4 per cent.

Leadership roles are also unevenly distributed, with men given more than three quarters of the jobs at 78 per cent. When scrutinizing leadership in technology alone, that figure rises to a staggering 88.7 per cent.

Breaking the figures down by race shows the largest ethnic group is White people at 49.8 per cent, followed by Asian people at 30.9 per cent, then Black people at 8.8 per cent, Hispanic people 5.6 per cent, 4.3 per cent for multiracial people, and finally Other – including Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander and American Indian/Alaska Native people – at 0.6 per cent.

At the technology level, the stats drop to 1.0 per cent for Black people, 2.1 per cent for Hispanics, 0.4 per cent for Other and 2.4 per cent for multiracial. But it grows to 47.9 per cent for Asian people.

It might be easy to criticize the transportation startup for its lack of diversity after the recent sexual harassment failures, but it’s important to realize that it’s a wider problem in technology – Uber’s figures are similar to other American tech firms.

The female tech teams at Twitter are made up of 15 per cent and are slightly higher at 17 per cent for Facebook, and 19 per cent for Google.

“We’re still relatively young as a company, and we know we have a lot more to do. In addition to moving the ball forward on all the data above, we recognize the relative lack of diversity across all forms of leadership, including on our board of directors, and will be thoughtful about diversity as the company grows,” the report promised.

Existing employees set up their own resource groups to pool together and find new ways to improve the existing workforce culture. There are teams like Shalom, which connects “Uberettos and Jewbers from all backgrounds,” UberHue for Black employees, and UberABLE for people with “physical, mental, and emotional disabilities.” ®

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