Transparency

This document is a follow-up to a Taxonomy & Transparency Workshop hosted on March 5, 2019, in San Francisco, California, by Uber for representatives of a variety of companies. It contains lessons learned by Uber from implementing the Sexual Misconduct and Violence Taxonomy developed by NSVRC and the Urban Institute, and is split into two parts that give deep views of elements necessary for implementing the Taxonomy in a corporate context at scale:

• Why a scaled classification audit function is crucial to ensuring accurate, repeatable external reporting of safety incident data based on strong internal alignment on the definition of Taxonomy terms
• Training examples similar to those in use by Uber teams to classify incidents based on the Sexual Misconduct and Assault Taxonomy, and the importance of auditing safety incident data to ensure accurate, repeatable reporting.

This report describes the work of a joint project between the NSVRC and the Urban Institute, in which a team of staff from both agencies developed an improved taxonomy (a system of categorization) for reports of sexual harassment, sexual misconduct, and sexual assault received by Uber Technologies, Inc. (Uber), from users of Uber's ride-sharing and other app-driven services. This improved taxonomy helps Uber to more effectively categorize reports of these sexually violent experiences, which in turn helps Uber to better determine the most appropriate outreach and ultimate action taken in response to each report.

The report also discusses the implications of this improved taxonomy for Uber's creation of transparency reports for sexual violence, and ways that this taxonomy and its method of development can improve similar efforts in other businesses and industries.