UBER CASE COULD BE A WATERSHED FOR WOMEN IN TECHNOLOGY
Few women in Silicon Valley were surprised by the revelations about Uber detailed this month by Susan Fowler, a software engineer who published an exposé on the culture of sexism and sexual harassment that she said she battled during her year at the ride-hailing company.
For many women in Silicon Valley, the contours of Fowler’s story rang true from sorry experience. There are tales like hers from across the tech industry. This week, The Guardian reported that a female Tesla employee had filed suit against the electriccar company for what she called “pervasive harassment.” (Tesla said in a statement that the claims “have not been substantiated.”) And even in cases where abuse is well documented — as in Ellen Pao’s unsuccessful sexual harassment lawsuit against the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers — the men responsible are rarely punished, and the overall picture rarely improves.
Still, the Uber scandal feels different. It feels like a watershed. For gender-diversity advocates in the tech industry, Fowler’s allegations, and the public outcry they have ignited, offer a possibility that something new may be in the offing.
What could happen? Something innovative: This could be the start of a deep, long-term and thorough effort to remake a culture that has long sidelined women — not just at Uber but across the tech business, too.
“I still see hope and opportunity for Uber,” said Freada Kapor Klein, a partner at the venture capital firm Kapor Capital and co-chairwoman of the Kapor Centre for Social Impact, who along with her husband, the entrepreneur Mitch Kapor, are investors in Uber. Last week, the couple published a scathing open letter pushing the company to more openly investigate its culture. Kapor Klein said that Uber was well known in the tech industry for its unfriendliness to women.
“Uber is pretty far along a spectrum,” she said. “The word among women engineers I talk to is that Uber is the epitome of bro-grammer culture.”
But precisely for those reasons, Kapor Klein argued that if Uber mounted an honest investigation into its culture and pledged to transparently remake what ails it, it could become a model for the industry.
“They did ask me, ‘Has anyone gotten it right in tech?’ ” she said. “And I said not yet. And that means an opportunity for Uber.”
This might sound Pollyannaish. But Uber’s business incentives lend credence to Kapor Klein’s guarded optimism. At the moment, Uber’s brand is in tatters. It has weathered a long series of scandals and controversies stemming from its aggressive fight against regulators and competitors. Customers refuse to give it the benefit of the doubt; even when Uber’s actions aren’t devious (as when it was wrongly accused of breaking a New York taxi strike held in protest of President Trump’s immigration ban), few spring to its defense.
That’s a reasonable position given the new depths to which Uber constantly sinks. For instance, last year the company defied California state regulators to run a self-driving car experiment in San Francisco. When one of its cars ran a red light, Uber put out a statement blaming human error for the problem. As The New York Times reported last week, that wasn’t true. The car was driving itself and Uber had misled the public.
Any company with such a reckless culture and tarnished reputation would have to do something to remake its brand. But Uber faces extra motivation to do so.
Unlike many aggressive start-ups that have come before it — Amazon and Facebook, for instance, were no pushovers — Uber is not a natural monopoly. It sells a service that has ready substitutes, and it has well-funded competitors in many of its major markets. Its rivals have put their supposedly friendlier brands at the centre of their competitive strategy. They are all waiting for Uber to fail, and every time Uber finds a way to lower its reputation even further, competitors can peel off customers, drivers and engineers. Finally, there’s the Trump factor. Ever since the presidential election, people in the tech industry have been amped up. Employees and customers have learned to take up arms against companies that don’t espouse their values, and companies have started to listen.
“Left-leaning Silicon Valley has been embracing the Women’s March and had this heightened awareness about issues that women face due to misogynistic men,” said Karen Catlin, a former software engineer who is now an advocate for women in the tech industry. Now the same socialmedia energy aimed at President Trump is being marshaled against Uber, better known on Twitter as #deleteUber.