Whistleblowing
How one woman took on Uber over harrassment
Schon vor der Metoo-bewegung schrieb Susan Fowler in ihrem Blog über die Belästigungen, denen sie bei Uber ausgesetzt war. Nun hat sie ein Buch über ihre Erfahrungen geschrieben und hofft, damit anderen Frauen bei sexuellen Übergriffen am Arbeitsplatz zu helfen. AMELIA TAIT berichtet.
In February 2017, Susan Fowler was thrown into the public eye. She had written a blog post exposing the sexism she experienced working as a software engineer at Uber, a ride-hailing company based in San Francisco. And in her new book, Whistleblower, she explains how she came to shake up one of the world’s most valuable start-ups. Despite the title of her book, however, Fowler can’t be described by one word alone. She is a musician, a writer, a physicist and a philosopher: a person who wants to be seen, she has written, as more than “that woman who was sexually harassed”.
“It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him”
Six million people read Fowler’s blog post, in which she talked about her time at what was then the number-one disrupter in Silicon Valley. In the post — titled “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber” — Fowler explained how she was hassled by her new boss on her first official day at the company.
“He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn’t,” Fowler recalled him saying. “It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him.” Fowler immediately reported the conversation to HR. The manager was not punished because he was a “high performer”.
Inspiring the Me Too movement
That was just the beginning of the sexism Fowler would face there. Over the course of her year at Uber, she was given negative performance reviews by another boss. He wanted to stop her from being promoted so that he could keep her and other women on his team. Fowler was also told that she was “the common theme” in all the reports she had made to HR about sexist comments that had been made to her. In one strange incident, 120 male engineers were rewarded with official leather jackets, while the six female engineers were told that jackets for them were too expensive.
Fowler’s blog post was explosive. It was shared thousands of times on Twitter alone, and Fowler recalls going to a bookshop a few hours after posting and overhearing two people “arguing about whether I was telling the truth”. A day after the post, former US attorney general Eric Holder was hired to organize an independent review of Uber’s working environment; the investigation was to be overseen by Uber’s chief HR officer and Arianna Huffington, a US businesswoman.
Fowler’s post inspired the tech industry’s Me Too movement half a year before the #Metoo hashtag even existed. Other women began to come forward with stories of sexism in Silicon Valley. Dave Mcclure, CEO of 500 Startups, a business accelerator, resigned in the summer of 2017 and wrote a blog post called “I’m a Creep. I’m Sorry” after The New York Times reported he had sent sexually inappropriate messages to a potential employee. In December 2017, Fowler and four other women (among them Taylor Swift) were chosen as Time magazine’s people of the year. They were called the “silence breakers”.
“I have no idea,” Fowler says when I ask why her post gained such attention. “At the time, no information I had told me that my story would be treated differently from anyone else’s.” Fowler had spent a year at Uber trying to get the company to care about the sexism and bullying taking place there — her complaints had always fallen on deaf ears. “I was speaking the
truth in a system that doesn’t value the truth, but as soon as you go out of it, then speaking the truth actually has an impact. It turns out a lot of people care... Not everybody is interested in ignoring bad behaviour. I learned I had to go outside the system.”
Exposing the scale of the problem
In truth, it is likely that the response to Fowler’s post was connected to a wider backlash against Uber that was happening at the time. A month before Fowler wrote her blog post, Uber had agreed to pay $20 million (€18.2 million) to the US government after the Federal Trade Commission accused the company of misleading drivers about potential earnings. Six months before that, the press had begun to uncover sexual harassment by Uber drivers. After a Buzzfeed News investigation, Uber admitted there had been 170 customer reports (by English-speaking users) with a “legitimate claim of sexual assault” between December 2012 and August 2015. And a Freedom of Information request by the The Sun newspaper in Britain found that 32 London drivers had been accused of assault between 2015 and 2016.
Holder’s investigation into Uber concluded that the company’s culture was dysfunctional and advised improved HR training and better complaint tracking procedures. Holder also recommended that Uber “review and reallocate the responsibilities of Travis Kalanick”, Uber’s CEO at the time. Kalanick had reportedly known about sexual harassment allegations within the company and had failed to act. He had a reputation himself for inappropriate behaviour. On 21 June 2017, he resigned as CEO.
On her first day at “Uberversity” — Uber’s three-day-long training programme for new employees — Fowler and her class were told that they weren’t allowed to date “TK”. The instructor told the confused participants “that she knew all of us wanted to date TK, but it was, she said with a sigh, against the rules”. It wasn’t until later that Fowler realized TK was Kalanick.
To what extent does Fowler believe Kalanick’s resignation solved the problems at Uber? While she believes a culture of workplace bullying came from the top, she also describes the company’s problems as “systemic”. When Fowler joined Uber, 25 per cent of its engineers were women — by the time she left, they made up just six per cent.
“At Uber, every time something happened, I would escalate it, and [it] eventually got to the point where I was sitting across from the CTO and telling him everything that was going on. He promised to fix it and promised to take it seriously, just like all the HR people before,” Fowler says. “And then he sent someone from HR to speak to me, and it was the same thing: this is their first offence, they’re a high performer, we don’t feel comfortable punishing them, we’ve given them a stern warning. I remember thinking: this isn’t just one manager; this is every HR person here and everyone up my management chain… I had to leave.”
That chief technology officer was Thuan Pham, who is still Uber’s CTO today. According to an investigation by The
Information, a Us-based digital media company, Pham was allowed to keep his job after sharing evidence with Holder that proved he had taken Fowler’s case seriously after their meeting.
When asked how she feels about the fact that Pham is still employed by Uber, Fowler is diplomatic. “What I do hope is things have changed, and that what happened to me won’t happen to anyone else again,” she says. Most of Fowler’s friends have now left Uber, and she says she has no idea how it is run today. “I hope that things are getting better — it’s been three years!” she laughs.
When she wrote her blog post, she was working at another start-up, Stripe, but just over a year and a half later, she joined The New York Times as a technology editor. She sounds very happy when she speaks of her career in journalism and seems pleased to feel as if she is “outside” the tech industry now. At the end of Whistleblower, she describes her new priorities: writing, learning languages, reading Go, Dog. Go! to her small daughter.
“I was speaking the truth in a system that doesn’t value the truth”
Inspired by Plato
“It was hard to revisit,” she says of writing Whistleblower. “These were some of the most extreme and painful experiences of my life.” It’s no wonder that Fowler is so happy to have moved on — after her blog post exploded, private investigators began prying into her personal life, trying to discredit her. Strangers would ring her family and friends and ask questions about her past; rumours spread that Uber competitor Lyft had paid her to write her post; men followed her on foot and in cars. “It was terrifying because I didn’t know what they were looking for or what their goal was, or what they wanted to do with the information,” she says. “It was very, very scary.”
Yet despite these experiences, Fowler wants readers to remember her not as “the woman who was harassed at Uber” but rather as “the woman who stood up and spoke out about harassment at Uber”. Less the story of how Fowler became a victim, Whistleblower is more of a guide to how she became a hero.
During our conversation, she is most animated when she talks about the philosophers she read as a teen who informed her moral code — Plato, Epictetus, Isaiah Berlin. “I did not have control over my circumstances, but I did have control over my character, the decisions I made, the actions I took, and the things that I said. And that was so important for me.”
Fowler’s determination to blow the whistle on Uber had its roots in an incident in her past when she felt she had “very much been morally obligated to speak out and didn’t”.
“It’s amazing to me how everything that happened in my life then was preparing me for this moment,” Fowler says today. “I learned all these big lessons, so when the time came to blow the whistle on Uber, I was ready.” By the time she worked at Uber, Fowler says, it was “second nature” to screenshot, report and forward any “weird” interactions, as well as save this evidence to the cloud and print out hard copies. She says her book is a way to share those lessons with others. “The most powerful thing you can do is tell the truth, and the most powerful way you can tell the truth is with all this documentation. Then nobody can say it’s a ‘he says, she says’ situation because look, I have the evidence.”
Fowler’s telling of her time at Uber is very personal. She doesn’t talk about the Me Too movement or write much about accusations of sexual assault by Uber drivers. Her story is very much her own — she tells about living in poverty, falling in love with the violin, getting her first job at Spider Pharm at the age of 11 and homeschooling herself. She paints a picture of an independent and determined person: as a university student, she would fall asleep immersed in her textbooks, excited to teach herself the science and maths she needed to keep up.
She also admits to things that private investigators would no doubt have loved to expose — after her father died of brain cancer when she was a student, she checked herself into a mental health facility. “I almost didn’t include that … but I realized I didn’t want people who’d been through something similar to think they couldn’t speak up, too,” she says. Her book is a way to provide a “fuller picture” than a magazine cover, she adds, to show that you don’t have to be the perfect victim to blow the whistle. “I want to encourage people to speak up no matter what, and the best way for me to do that is to be open about my life.”
Women should follow their dreams
Can we really expect individual women to find solutions to the problem of systemic harassment? It’s one thing to inspire women to speak out, quite another to persuade them to try to change the conditions in which harassment happens. “I know, that’s the paradox, right?” she says. “That’s the painful part … because we know it’s very scary, and we know what happens to women who speak out.” In the end, though, she says: “You have to do what’s right for you — in myself, I felt a deep moral obligation.”
No one can be sure meaningful changes have occurred in Silicon Valley in the three years since Fowler’s blog post. (Uncanny Valley, a book by Anna Wiener, was released in January 2020. It also describes an industry in which sexual harassment is common.) Uber isn’t even the first start-up where Fowler faced discrimination. After university, she was hired by the financial services company Plaid, where she learned that her male colleagues were being paid $50,000 (€45,600) per year more than she was. After that, she worked at software company Pubnub, where her boss made horrific statements that led Fowler to believe he “truly, deeply, passionately hated women”.
All in all, it paints a depressing picture of life as a female engineer. Fowler says she “realized I really wasn’t welcome in those environments”, but she also says she doesn’t want to discourage other women from entering the field. “I don’t want to discourage any young women from following their dreams. I think the best thing they can do is understand what their rights are and stand up for themselves and advocate for themselves, and then when things start to go wrong just speak out. The more of us who speak out, the louder our voices will be, until they just can’t be ignored.”
Fowler’s book ends with her riding in a Lyft — Uber’s rival in the US. Is it a final “fuck you” to Uber? “They’re the only ones who will drive me around!” she laughs. “Uber banned me, so I can’t sign up. I tried signing up, and it said they can’t complete my registration, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, I wonder why!’”
“This isn’t just one manager; this is everyone up my management chain”