Uber’s hasty drive toward growth put diversity in the backseat

Uber employees and drivers listen to an address by CEO Travis Kalanick marking the company's five year anniversary in San Francisco, California June 3, 2015. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

Efforts to hire more women and people of colour at Uber Technologies Inc have been long hindered by a peculiar constraint. Members of the recruiting team were denied access to information about the company’s diversity makeup, according to several people familiar with Uber’s hiring apparatus.  

The recruiting arm assigns some members to focus on hiring diverse candidates, an initiative that has received enthusiastic endorsements from Uber chief executive officer Travis Kalanick. But the team found it difficult to do its job without demographic data, which is a common way to identify a company’s weaknesses and set hiring targets, the people said.