Uber’s Chief People Officer, Liane Hornsey has resigned from the company. She emailed staff on Tuesday to inform everyone of the decision, and this comes after an investigation was started over how she had handled allegations of racial discrimination inside the company. The investigation was started because of accusations from anonymous whistleblowers that stated Hornsey had dismissed internal complaints of racial discrimination, numerous times. Of course this investigation does raise quite a few questions about Uber’s new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi and how he has been working to get rid of Uber’s “toxic” culture, after taking over in August of 2017.
Hornsey had been Uber’s head of human resources (tech companies now use the “Chief People Officer” for that position), and also served as one of the top spokespeople at Uber on diversity and discrimination issues, which makes it rather ironic that she is being investigated over dismissing discrimination complaints. Hornsey had been the CPO for about 18 months before resigning. She took the position shortly after a number of scandals involving Uber’s founder and first CEO, Travis Kalanick, found himself involved in. Which ultimately ended with Kalanick leaving the company, and Khosrowshahi taking over the ride-hailing startup.
Now this investigation could be part of Uber looking to clean up shop, since it is planning to go public in the next year or two. And these the type of things that could cause its stock to plummet in a single day and force Uber to lose a ton of money. Making it tougher to continue on. Uber has been looking to clean up its image over the past year or so, especially after the numerous scandals it found itself involved with. Which included a boycott of Uber, and the #DeleteUber hashtag trending on Twitter for a few weeks last year. Which did help Uber’s primary competitor, Lyft, get more market share, but it’s something Uber wants to fix before it does IPO next year.