When Susan Fowler, a Bay Area-based writer and engineer who until recently worked for Uber, published a blog post on her personal Web site last week, the piece, which detailed a pattern of gender discrimination at the car-hailing company, quickly went viral. Among the experiences Fowler described in “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber” were communications with a sexually inappropriate and vindictive manager, and the company’s failure to respond properly to Fowler’s reports of his misconduct. As the problems persisted, Fowler wrote, and she was prevented from moving teams and from being promoted, she reported every infraction to H.R. This later led an H.R. representative to ask whether Fowler had considered that she herself might be the issue—a comment that Fowler also diligently noted.
Fowler has little to gain from publicly confronting Uber, and plenty to lose; she was brave to speak out. As a result of her allegations, more bad behavior at Uber has been exposed, and Travis Kalanick, the company’s C.E.O., has tasked a small council, led by the former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, with investigating the charges. On Monday, a second blog post, by a different woman, titled “I am an Uber survivor,” detailing new instances of abuse and harassment at the company, circulated on social media. And yet it bears mentioning that Fowler is as well-situated to go public with her story as anyone could ever hope to be. She kept a paper trail of chats and e-mails; she kept her cool. She is already established in her field. Last year, she published a best-selling programming book, “Production-Ready Microservices,” with O’Reilly Media. She is young, white, and married. Her blog post was well-written, personal, and serious, but not “emotional,” a quality that is often denigrated in women writing about their own experiences. That she is an engineer gives her added credibility and power, and likely makes her more sympathetic to her industry peers, most of whom, especially on the engineering side, are male. Engineers are expensive to hire, and ostensibly harder to find, and fire, than non-technical employees. As someone who has worked in several customer-facing roles at startups, I understand that, in the value hierarchy of the tech industry, non-engineering roles are considered second-tier. Soft-skilled jobs—including marketing, support, and operations—also tend to be occupied by more women. (At Google, forty-seven per cent of non-technical roles are filled by women, compared with nineteen per cent in engineering.) Women who complain about sexism in tech are often deemed troublemakers, but those who are engineers are likely to be tolerated longer than others.
Last year, an independent study of more than two hundred women who had been in tech for more than a decade, “Elephant in the Valley,” found that sixty per cent of respondents had experienced unwanted sexual advances and that, of those, most did nothing because they felt that reporting the incidents would hurt their careers. To speak out is to make yourself vulnerable—at the office, in your professional network, in your Google search results. (“I am afraid to make my name public,” the pseudonymous author of “I am an Uber survivor” wrote.) As Fowler’s case suggests, H.R. departments often prioritize the protection of the company rather than the employee. I know several women who have been asked to leave their jobs in order to resolve disputes with their employers. Many companies also offer severance pay contingent on signing an arbitration agreement, or a non-disparagement clause. It’s not easy leaving money on the table in exchange for the possibility of speaking your mind. This can be complicated further if there are potentially life-changing stock options involved, which usually can only be exercised within a few months of termination. In an industry that employs a significant number of immigrants, one’s immigration status—or that of a partner—is another reason not to trouble the waters. Then there is the inevitability of online harassment and retaliation, and the difficulty of going up against a private corporation that will do anything it can to protect its brand. “Research for the smear campaign has begun,” Fowler tweeted on Friday. “If you are contacted by anyone asking for personal and intimate info about me, please report asap.” (Uber has denied any involvement in these requests.)
Fowler’s case appears as black and white as they come; one of its many “strengths” is that all the incidents she reported occurred in the workplace, during working hours, when everyone involved was (presumably) sober. But tech culture specializes in gray areas. At many companies, work and social life come bundled: colleagues become friends, and friends are recruited as colleagues. (The lack of meritocracy in Silicon Valley is another, although related, story.) Corporate retreats can resemble family vacations: co-workers drinking on the beach in swim trunks and bikinis, or sharing a post-ski hot tub in Tahoe. It’s all very luxurious, and personal, and confusing. When you split a cab with a co-worker after a company wine-tasting party and he tries to slip his hand under the waist of your jeans, the odds of your complaint being taken seriously seem slim. But less extreme cases abound. If a male colleague uses a sexually suggestive photograph while giving an internal presentation, will H.R. see that as an offense, or just part of the playful freedom that people sign on for when they choose to work at a startup?
During an annual review a few years ago, I asked my employer about the process for reporting juvenile and sexist behavior in the office. My manager responded by suggesting that we meet specifically to discuss the issue and determine new policies. The well-intentioned suggestion reminded me that, in tech, women and underrepresented minorities are themselves often asked to assume the mantle for diversity efforts—work for which they are rarely compensated. The lack of incentive is exacerbated by the notion that to work on such issues might cramp the style of the office culture. No one wants to be the feminist killjoy.
Just as Fowler was something of a perfect plaintiff, Uber is, in some ways, a model villain. The company has long inspired Schadenfreude. It has been accused of mishandling customer reports of sexual harassment by drivers. In 2014, Kalanick joked to GQ that his company should be called “Boob-er,” for increasing his profile among women. On Monday, Uber’s senior vice-president of engineering, Amit Singhal, resigned, after it came to light that he had retired from his previous job, at Google, following allegations of sexual harassment. Earlier this year, Kalanick’s brief tenure on Donald Trump’s economic advisory committee was met with dissent from employees and riders alike. But sexism and sexual harassment happen at Silicon Valley’s darling companies, too. For tech workers, like me, it can—and does—happen at the desks across from ours. The business that I now work for had its own public harassment case in 2014; I joined the company six months later, in part because I was hopeful that sexism and discrimination would at least be part of the conversation internally, as opposed to the industry’s standard protocol of acting as though such things never happened. The problems that Fowler illustrated are not just Uber’s. They are cultural, systemic, and not “very, very strange” at all; in fact, for many of us, they could not have sounded more familiar.
