Though it had been widely reported that Uber sought a woman as its next chief—HPE (HPE) CEO Meg Whitman was in the running for the top job as recently as this weekend—the company’s board ultimately settled on a man.
Regardless of gender, the ride-hailing startup’s new chief Dara Khosrowshahi is tasked with turning around the company’s culture, which has been called hostile to women: Over the last few months, more than 20 employees were terminated as a result of an internal investigation that resulted from the blog post of former Uber engineer Susan Fowler. Sexual harassment, bullying, and retaliation were given as reasons for many of the firings.
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Khosrowshahi most recently led travel bookings website Expedia (EXPE), which has a fairly clean public record when it comes to treatment of female employees (one caveat: thanks to arbitration clauses in many employment contracts, it’s very possible that female employees have brought private complaints against the company).
The company did get some criticism earlier this year when it opted not to pull its ads from The O’Reilly Factor after a New York Times report revealed previously unknown sexual harassment allegations against host Bill O’Reilly.
When it comes to gender diversity of its overall workforce, the company is roughly on par with the rest of the country: 50% of its employees and 25% of its tech group is female. For context: 47% of the workforce of the U.S. Is female while about 24% of tech workers are female, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology, respectively.
The company is outpacing its tech company peers when it comes to leadership: 35% of its leadership team is female, whereas the number is closer to a quarter for most Silicon Valley companies, according to a February 2017 analysis by statistics portal Statista. At 33%, PayPal (PYPL) is on the higher end of the range, while Microsoft is on the lower end at 18%.
Expedia’s board is about 21% female as of March of this year (the average on Coins2Day 500 company boards is roughly 20%), when it added Chelsea Clinton, vice chair of the Clinton Foundation.
Last summer, the company released the results of an internal compensation analysis, reporting that it does not have a gender pay gap; women in its workforce earn $1 for every $1 paid to men in equivalent roles.
