By VERONICA SPAGNA

Uber is one of the most important ride-hailing services worldwide. With the value of nearly $70 billion, this company has been having some trouble with its image and its company culture.

Because of its current negative public perception. Uber conducted an internal investigation because of its desire to change. It consequently released a diversity report this Tuesday. This is the first report the company has ever released and it makes sense why it was kept hidden.

Uber clearly needs to step up its game, especially after the numerous scandals that occurred in the past months. The scandals include cases of female employees being sexually harassed, a viral video showing of Travis Kalanick, the CEO of Uber being disrespectful to a driver, and other unprofessional business practices.

The report shows the diversity of the company employees, not including the Uber drivers as they are freelancers.

The report depicted that nearly 50 percent of Uber’s employees are white, 31 percent are Asian, 8.8% are black, and the other 5.6 percent are Hispanic.

The report also showed that 36 percent of the employees are women, 15 pefcent of tech and 22 percent of leadership positions are held by women.

Uber wants to make progress by being transparent and states that there should be a balance in the ethnicity and sexes in the positions offered by the company.

Many journalists and reporters reacted with no surprise to the unbalance of female employees in Uber. In fact, many seemed to be supportive of the idea that Uber wants to fix this issue. This could be correlated to the fact that the diversity in numerous tech companies is very unbalanced and most employees, especially in higher positions consist of white males.

It’s not just Uber that has a low level of diversity. Many articles mentioned that tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple and more, seem to have very similar numerical figures. For example, 67 percent of Facebook employees are men, 69 percent of Google employees are men, and so on.

The focus of most articles that I read on the issue did not focus on criticizing Uber but focused on the lack of diversity in many tech companies. Some titles of articles based on Uber’s first diversity report were: ‘Uber’s first diversity report reveals no surprises.’ Another article title on the topic ‘Uber looks like the rest of tech: White, Asian and male.’

Tech companies and their importance in our developing world continue to become more important.