What about a straight while male with strong prior experience changing the culture at a company and with experience in transportation?
There are many qualifications that need to be considered, and boiling it all down to one qualification above all others, being a women, is incredibly diminishing and overtly discriminatory.
The qualifications should be defined in terms wholly indifferent to race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, etc.
Individuals who happen to be white and or male and are now experiencing a culture that now blames them for everything because they are of the same gender and skin color as people in the past that did bad things now also have experience dealing with a toxic culture. It may only be 5 years or so experience dealing with a toxic culture, but you usually only need about 5 years or so experience with something to be qualified so long as you are well qualified in other aspects the job requires.
Imagine Uber had persistent database consistency problems, and a nontechnical member of the board laughed them off, and had to resign as a result. Shouldn't they be replaced with someone with direct experience in database consistency?
> He needs to be replaced by a more qualified individual
Being a woman doesn't make you an expert in sexism. Anyone, regardless of race, gender, or creed could fit that role. So long as they are QUALIFIED.
After five months of examining the company's culture,
Uber's new human resources officer, Liane Hornsey
concluded that the firm's treatment of women was no
worse than what occurs at other companies.
Uber's biggest employee problems are pay and pride, not
sexism, says HR boss “Wherever I have worked, I have
seen things that are not great for women,” Hornsey said
in a USA TODAY interview. “I don’t think it’s about tech,
or this city or this company. I think it’s about the
world of work, and I think that it’s something that we
have to take really super seriously.”
Liane Hornsey was formerly the VP of People Operations at Google for like 5 years I think. I'm far more inclined to believe her account of what things are like than any journalist lazily trolling for any disgruntled former employee to recount a story that will generate ad impressions.
Does Uber have a problem with women in particular because there is something special about Uber or does it have "a problem with women in particular" because it's a tech company and the media established a narrative with momentum that it is somehow worse than other companies in this respect. If Facebook or Github had been founded in 2009, they'd be the scapegoat for what is an industry-wide problem.
Thinking this is specific to Uber and that Uber is somehow worse, just leaves all other companies with an unexamined culture. Worse yet, it leads other companies to think "Our culture is fine because at least we're not Uber" when they probably have all the same problems.
Her job is to represent and protect the company. HR isn't there to give blunt, honest truth to journalists. They're there to say "everything's fine, no need to sue".
But in this specific case, being a woman actually is a qualification. One of the key jobs for Uber's leadership in the immediate future is reducing sexism, and women are likely to have at least some personal experience being on the receiving end of it in their lives, which gives them a unique perspective.