SAN FRANCISCO — A little more than a week after Uber faced stinging accusations
that it had ignored female employees’ complaints of sexual harassment, the company dismissed the head of its engineering efforts for failing to disclose a sexual harassment claim from his previous job.
The search giant deemed an employee’s claim of sexual harassment against Mr. Singhal “credible” in an internal investigation, according
to two people familiar with the matter who declined to be identified because they were not allowed to speak on the matter.
In fact, the company held a goodbye party for Mr. Singhal, according to two people who
attended the party, one a current Google employee and another a former employee.
Last week, the Uber investors Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein wrote in an open letter to the company
that they were frustrated with how Uber had handled its culture issues and that they had “hit a dead end in trying to influence the company quietly from the inside.”
The issue involving Mr. Singhal dates to 2015, when he was still at Google.
The former Uber engineer Susan Fowler and other current and former employees have claimed
that the company’s human resources officials repeatedly ignored harassment claims about employees who were “top performers.”
Uber asked Eric H. Holder Jr., who served as attorney general under President Obama, to investigate those claims.
The swift dismissal of Mr. Singhal, a high-profile hire who signaled Uber’s ability to attract the technology industry’s most sought-after executives, comes at a particularly inopportune time for Uber, which is struggling with complaints
that a rough-and-tumble culture has allowed sexual harassment to go unpunished.
In his goodbye note to the company, there was no mention of a sexual harassment claim against him, or any other signs of problems.