By Sharanya Gopinathan
Um, it seems like things just won’t settle at Uber.
Uber has been in the news in all the worst ways over the last few months: from sexual harassment cases, to handling sexual harassment cases badly, to repeated reports and rumours about a toxic and misogynistic work culture that all began with one Uber engineer’s viral social media post in February.
Uber founder and CEO travis Kalanick recently resigned from his post as CEO, leading Uber to get on to the hunt for a new CEO. Given the terrible publicity the allegations of sexism and harassment brought to the company (and its stock prices), it seems the folks over at Uber were searching for a new female CEO to take the helm.
Incredibly, even after poring over binders of women executives, they couldn’t find a woman to do it. Not only where the pickings slim, but many of the women approached for the job, including their first choice, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, simply refused the post. Uber’s search, despite their best efforts, now comes down to three white men. Three cheers for diversity!
The Washington Post interestingly points out, though that there’s science to show that many times, women CEOs are put in place when a company is failing or doing badly (as Uber arguably is), so that they receive the negative attention when the company continues to do badly or crashes.