Christ-a-bloody-live.
Uber‘s CEO has ordered an urgent investigation after a blog post by a former employee alleging blatant sexual harassment went viral.
Susan J. Fowler, a former engineer at Uber who left the company in December last year, published a blog post this morning detailing her experiences of sexual harassment at the company, and the efforts her superiors went to to try and both cover it up and punish her for speaking out.
It starts out with what should be an open-and-shut case of textbook – and easily provable – sexual harassment.
“After the first couple of weeks of training, I chose to join the team that worked on my area of expertise, and this is where things started getting weird,” she writes. “On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn’t. He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn’t help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with. It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR.
But HR, Fowler writes, didn’t want to hear it. They claimed it was her (unnamed) manager’s first offence, and since he was “a high performer”, they wouldn’t feel comfortable punishing him “for what was probably an innocent mistake”.
Let’s be very clear: no random propositions of sex on a company chat have ever, in the history of chats, companies or even sex, been an innocent mistake. Asking a disinterested co-worker out? That’s a mistake. Whining to your new female employee that you can’t find other female employees to bang you? Not a mistake.
So, nothing happened, except that Fowler transferred to another team to avoid a negative performance review (a very possible consequence, HR warned her, of speaking out). But a few months later, she found out several other woman had similar complaints, and they arranged a big meeting with HR to discuss. It didn’t go well.
“It became obvious that both HR and management had been lying about this being “his first offence”, and it certainly wasn’t his last. Within a few months, he was reported once again for inappropriate behaviour, and those who reported him were told it was still his “first offence”. The situation was escalated as far up the chain as it could be escalated, and still nothing was done.”
And things only devolved from there. Her willingness to speak out was repeatedly used against her, culminating in her being threatened with termination.
“Less than a week after this absurd meeting, my manager scheduled a 1:1 with me, and told me we needed to have a difficult conversation,” she writes. “He told me I was on very thin ice for reporting his manager to HR. California is an at-will employment state, he said, which means we can fire you if you ever do this again. I told him that was illegal, and he replied that he had been a manager for a long time, he knew what was illegal, and threatening to fire me for reporting things to HR was not illegal. I reported his threat immediately after the meeting to both HR and to the CTO: they both admitted that this was illegal, but none of them did anything. (I was told much later that they didn’t do anything because the manager who threatened me “was a high performer”).”
Throughout this time, female employees were leaving Uber in droves. By the time she left – shortly after that incident – the number of women who made up the total employee number had dropped from 25% to less than 6%, and even less (3%) for engineers.
Fowler’s original tweet to the blog post has gone bonkers viral.
I wrote something up this weekend about my year at Uber, and why I left: https://t.co/SyREtfLuZH
— Susan Fowler Rigetti (@susanthesquark) February 19, 2017
Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick has now ordered an urgent investigation, and has vowed to fire anyone exhibiting this kind of behaviour.
1/ What’s described here is abhorrent & against everything we believe in. Anyone who behaves this way or thinks this is OK will be fired. https://t.co/6q29N7AL6E
— travis kalanick (@travisk) February 20, 2017
2/ I’ve instructed our CHRO Liane to conduct an urgent investigation. There can be absolutely no place for this kind of behavior at Uber.
— travis kalanick (@travisk) February 20, 2017
And Arianna Huffington, who sits on Uber’s Board of Directors, says she will help conduct “a full independent investigation” into the allegations, which, while in the spirit of things, kind of mitigates the idea of an “independent” investigation.
Just talked w/ Travis & as a representative of Uber’s Board I will work w/Liane to conduct a full independent investigation starting now 1/2
— Arianna Huffington (@ariannahuff) February 20, 2017
You can email me directly: ah@thriveglobal.com 2/2
— Arianna Huffington (@ariannahuff) February 20, 2017
You can and absolutely should have a read of Folwer’s full blog post here.
Photo: Uber.
