Whistleblower by Susan Fowler

Author:Susan Fowler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-02-17T16:00:00+00:00

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Refusing to be completely isolated at Uber, I befriended several other women on the engineering teams, many of whom belonged to a group called LadyEng. The group had been founded the year before I arrived, and most of the women who worked in technical roles were members of LadyEng. The group wasn’t very formal—most of our interactions with one another happened in a few chat rooms and over lunches in the cafeterias—but, over time, we all got to know each other.

Whenever we got together, I listened as the other women talked about harassment and discrimination that they were currently facing or had faced in the past. Just like me, they’d all learned the hard way that HR was there to protect the company, not the employees; they all seemed resigned to the fact that Uber’s HR department wouldn’t do anything about the mistreatment they experienced, and they viewed reporting things to HR as (at best) a formality that would lead nowhere. Many of them even said they’d given up on reporting things, because they knew from experience that HR would retaliate against them. Some of their stories sounded pretty similar to my own—something that I didn’t think very much of until one of the women mentioned that the manager who had mistreated her was also named Jake. The pieces all fell into place for the first time, and we realized that several of us had experienced harassment or similarly discriminatory treatment from the same manager and, furthermore, that HR had given us identical spiels each time one of us reported him: “this,” they told each of us, “is his first offense.” Just like me, the other women had believed HR when they were told it was Jake’s “first offense.”

One night, when I went out for drinks with several other women in the site reliability engineering department, we swapped stories.

“Oh, Jake,” one of my coworkers said with a bitter laugh as she looked into her drink, “he pulled that shit on me, too. ‘I’m in an open relationship,’ he said.”

We all groaned.

“Gross,” I said. “I can’t believe he said that to you, too.”

“You know what I said?” she asked as she burst into laughter. “I said, ‘Well, guess what, man? So is half of San Francisco. You’re not special!’”

With us at the bar was a young engineer named Laura, who was working in our group as an intern. When she started her internship, she was put on the chaos testing team, responsible for one of the most difficult, messy systems that Uber was running. Anyone else would have failed, and failed hard, at that job, but not Laura—she was too determined, too tough to give up. By the end of her internship, she had earned the respect of every single engineer in our department. Uber had offered her a job, and that night she was trying to decide whether she would accept. All of us at the table had been encouraging her to join. She had become a core

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