WeWork Adds Female Former Uber Executive To All-Male Board Ahead Of IPO

The We Company, which owns coworking space enterprise WeWork, decided Wednesday to add a woman to its board, after the company's IPO filing last month received investor backlash due to its all-male leadership.

Frances X. Frei, a former Uber executive and Harvard professor, will be added to the company's board of directors. The company will also add another member of the board within a year of going public, "with a commitment to increasing the board's gender and ethnic diversity."

The New York-based office-rental startup has faced several gender discrimination lawsuits in the past.

In July, WeWork was sued for gender and age discrimination at the company. A former senior vice president at the company said the majority of the company's large pay packages went to male executives, and a former construction executive said that he was unfairly replaced by a younger employee.

In October 2018, Ruby Anaya, the company's former director of product management, sued the company for multiple sexual harassment incidents involving male employees and alleged that she was fired in retaliation for reporting those incidents. She believes the incidents are part of the company's "frat-boy culture."

WeWork has called the lawsuit "meritless" and that Anaya was terminated "solely due to her poor performance."

WeWork is gearing up for its much anticipated IPO this year, and also announced Wednesday that CEO Adam Neumann will return $5.9 billion dollars of stock that was paid to him for the trademark "We." The payment had been criticized by investors, who believe that it reflects poor governance at the company.

David Erickson, a senior fellow and lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton business school, has said that WeWork has a "CEO who is going to control decision making that has to date not demonstrated the good judgment that I would expect from the CEO of a public company."

Although WeWork's office-rental model continues to expand, the firm still isn't profitable and had a net loss of $723 million in the first half of the year on about $764 million in revenue.

WeWork has been compared to two other cash-burning companies, Uber and Lyft. Both Uber and Lyft had disappointing IPOs earlier this year and investors are curious if WeWork will face the same fate.