In 2018, Uber, the former darling of Silicon Valley, was in a crisis. Mounting lawsuits, a data breach cover up scandal, leadership instability, and rising concerns over the company’s inability to turn a profit led many to question the firm’s future. To make matters worse, in June 2017, Uber was rocked by an employee blog post that detailed multiple incidents of sexual harassment and the company's inadequate response to her complaints. This led to a wave of similar allegations, exposing a toxic workplace culture at Uber.
Although the rideshare company has continued to struggle in recent years to do some of the same problems, by most accounts it succeeded in fixing the toxic culture that had prompted the 2017 blog post. The culture change has largely been attributed to Bo Young Lee, the chief diversity and inclusion officer who was appointed in January 2018.
Here is how the New York Times described Lee’s time at Uber:
“[She] has shepherded the company away from the aggressive, chaotic culture that pervaded under the former chief executive, Travis Kalanick. Mr. Khosrowshahi’s efforts included increased diversity initiatives under Ms. Lee, who has led the effort since 2018. Before joining Uber, she held similar roles at the financial services firm Marsh McLennan and other companies, according to her LinkedIn profile.”
However, despite Lee’s successful tenure with the company, she was put on leave last week. As the same NYT article details, the suspension comes in response to employee outrage over two training sessions Lee organized this year:
“Employees’ concerns centered on a pair of events, one last month and another last Wednesday, that were billed as “diving into the spectrum of the American white woman’s experience” and hearing from white women who work at Uber, with a focus on “the ‘Karen’ persona.” They were intended to be an “open and honest conversation about race,” according to the invitation.
But workers instead felt that they were being lectured on the difficulties experienced by white women and why “Karen” was a derogatory term and that Ms. Lee was dismissive of their concerns, according to messages sent on Slack, a workplace messaging tool, that were viewed by The Times.”
It might surprise some that just one misstep, if you’re inclined to consider these training sessions as such, would lead to the dismissal of an esteemed officer. However, I imagine the calculation was quite a simple one for the decision makers at Uber. Lee succeeded with the tough project of reforming the company’s toxic, tech-bro culture in the late 2010’s. The hard work is done. Now, they must imagine that they can just plug in any other relatively competent diversity officer to maintain the status quo. They’re probably right.
While it might be a simple decision viewed through a bottom-line management perspective, this case raises all sorts of questions about how and if companies can make progress on diversity and inclusion. What H.R. “experts” prescribe as best practices are proven not to work. Journalist Matt Iglesias wrote a long, well-researched post about this last year:
“Do people who undergo training usually shed their biases? Researchers have been examining that question since before World War II, in nearly a thousand studies. It turns out that while people are easily taught to respond correctly to a questionnaire about bias, they soon forget the right answers. The positive effects of diversity training rarely last beyond a day or two, and a number of studies suggest that it can activate bias or spark a backlash. Nonetheless, nearly half of midsize companies use it, as do nearly all the Fortune 500."
It would seem that a new approach is in order. However, as Bo Young Lee has proved this week, new approaches are risky business.