Uber diversity chief on leave for ‘Karen’ talk
Employees complained that session on white women’s experience of race was ‘tone deaf’
‘Sometimes being pushed out of your own strategic ignorance is the right thing to do’
UBER’S head of diversity has been placed on leave after a black employee complained about a “tone-deaf ” internal session on white women titled “Don’t Call Me Karen”.
Bo Young Lee was placed on leave by chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi last week after a backlash to the event, which was meant to focus on “the spectrum of the American white woman’s experience”. The event, which referenced the derogatory term for middle aged white women “Karen”, featured white Uber employees discussing their own experiences of race and gender.
Ms Young Lee, a former advisor to Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, encouraged Uber staff to “have an open and honest conversation about race”.
However, the session prompted anger among some staff who felt they were being lectured, according to The New York Times. Employees complained that the “Karen” session and a second workplace talk left them feeling “in pain and upset”.
Internal emails reported by The New York Times show a black female employee complained that Ms Lee’s events were “tone-deaf, offensive and triggering”.
At the second of the two events, black and Hispanic workers used internal chat apps to complain they felt “scolded for the entirety of that meeting”. Some staff complained that the event minimised racism by equating the term “Karen” with other slurs.
“Karen” is a term of abuse used to refer to middle-class white women with a sense of entitlement. The term originates from a line in the 2004 film Mean Girls and in Britain it has been included on an Ofcom list of offensive terms.
In response to questions about the event at an all-staff meeting, Ms Young Lee said that “sometimes being pushed out of your own strategic ignorance is the right thing to do”.
Ms Young Lee has since been placed on leave. Noah Edwardsen, a spokesman for Uber, confirmed the “leave of absence”.
The incident highlights the difficulties facing companies handling issues of race and gender in an increasingly fractious and fraught political landscape. US tech companies have found themselves in conflict with some employees in recent years. Google employees staged a walkout in 2018 over the company’s treatment of women.
Facebook staff took part in a virtual protest in 2020 over posts on the platform from Donald Trump, the former US president, that they argued were “advocating violence against black demonstrators”.
Even avoiding a stance on the issues can prove problematic. Brian Armstrong, the chief of Coinbase, caused outrage among staff after declaring that his business would be a “company first” and avoid advocacy.
Mr Armstrong wrote in a 2020 blog post: “It has become common for Silicon Valley companies to engage in a wide variety of social activism, even those unrelated to what the company does… while I think these efforts are well intentioned, they have the potential to destroy a lot of value at most companies, both by being a distraction, and by creating internal division.”
Mr Khosrowshahi was hired as chief executive of Uber in 2017 to help clean up the company’s image after a series of scandals.
Founder Travis Kalanick was ousted amid complaints of harassment and bullying at the company.
Under Mr Kalanick, Uber also took an aggressive and controversial approach to regulations by expanding into markets before seeking a licence.
The taxi app came close to losing its London operating licence after developing what the deputy chief magistrate of England and Wales described in court as a “track record of breaches”.