Uber, found itself in an unrelated Sexual Harassment scandal stemming from a detailed essay by a former Uber Engineer Susan Fowler who charged the HRD for ignoring her complaints about sexual harassment.
Hardly a week had elapsed when the company dismissed the head of its engineering department for failing to disclose a sexual harassment claim from his previous job, with Google. Amit Singhal had joined Uber last month and was a well-known name in the Silicon Valley and was instrumental in improving the Google Algorithms which put it way ahead of other search engines.
The executive was part of the Google Search efforts for 15 years before joining Uber last month. Uber came to know that Amit Singhal had not disclosed the circumstances for leaving Google which is said was related to sexual misconduct. Google was going to dismiss Singhal when an internal investigation carried out after an allegation of sexual misconduct was found valid. However, Amit resigned citing his desire to engage in Philanthropic activities before joining Uber last month.
Uber stemming the rot
The quick dismissal of Singhal could not have come at the worst time when Uber is in the line of fire for trivializing complaints about sexual harassments. Numerous former employees including former engineer Susan Fowler claimed that harassment complaints were often ignored when it involved top-performing executives.
Uber has gone into a firefight mode and roped in Eric H. Holder Jr., who served as attorney general under President Obama, to investigate the claims. Last week top investors in Uber, Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein in an open letter expressed anguish at the way Uber handled its culture issues.
Uber executive Amit Singhal resigns over sexual harassment allegations https://t.co/t72m8IoUOI
— The Independent (@Independent) February 28, 2017
Unsavory Past
The issue about Amit Singhal dates back to 2015 when he was still employed by Google.
An employee made a complaint of sexual harassment against him, and the search engine giant found the charges credible in an internal investigation. Amit was a big name at Google and contributed immensely in refurbishing the search engine algorithms. He was about to be dismissed but he tended his papers, and the issue remained under wraps. It did not crop up even when Uber made a cross check before hiring Amit.
