Uber board member makes sexist joke during sexual harassment meeting

By Sam Barsanti  |  June 13, 2017 | 10:47pm
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Uber CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick just announced that he’s taking a leave of absence from the company because he’s basically the worst, but his awfulness is far from Uber’s only problem. Much like Fox News, it seems like it’s a company that is basically rotten to the core, which an Uber board member named David Bonderman made clear during a company-wide meeting today. As reported by The Washington Post, Bonderman made an “inappropriate” joke about women during the meeting, which had been called so the company could discuss—get this—”the harassment of women and other unprofessional conduct within the company.”

Apparently, fellow board member Ariana Huffington was talking about the benefits of adding more women to Uber’s board, at which point Bonderman interrupted her to say that having more women around would make it “much more likely there’ll be more talking.” Bonderman, who The Washington Post notes is a “billionaire businessman,” presumably then proceeded to nudge the other men around the table and make sure they got it, followed by him jumping into a riff on how women like to shop.

Unfortunately for Bonderman, while his sexist sense of humor would’ve been appropriate in a hacky stand-up routine from the ‘80s, it didn’t go over too well during this meeting on sexual harassment. Though it’s unclear what aspect of the response to his joke actually prompted it, Bonderman eventually made a personal apology to Huffington and released a statement in which he apologized to Uber’s employees:

With that apology taken care of, Bonderman can now return to his life as a billionaire who likes to make sexist jokes about women, directly to women, while in the middle of meetings specifically about sexual harassment against women.

 
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