Just two weeks after finishing training and on her first official day at Uber in November 2015, “…things started getting weird,” former engineer Susan Fowler wrote in her blog on Feb. 19. Fowler detailed that her new manager told her in a series of company chat messages that he was in an open relationship with his girlfriend who, unlike him, was having a easier time scouting out new partners.
“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,” Fowler wrote. “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.”
As disturbing as those messages were, Fowler was confident Uber’s HR department, especially considering the size of the company, “would handle the situation appropriately, and then life would go on.” she wrote. “Unfortunately, things played out quite a bit differently.”
HR and upper management agreed with Fowler that what her manager did was sexual harassment, but reasoned that because it was his first transgression, “they wouldn’t feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to,” Fowler wrote. “Upper management told me that he ‘was a high performer’ (i.e. had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn't feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part,” she added.
HR told Fowler she could either join another team and avoid the manager or stay with the team and accept that the manager would likely give her a negative review and that they would do nothing about it. Fowler choose to move to another team, but she soon learned from other women at the firm of similar stories about their encounters with the same manager.
Still, in the year that Fowler worked at Uber and reached out to HR with other complaints, she said the department repeatedly accused her of lying, saying she was to blame and undermining her whenever she reported inappropriate incidents.
In a comment to CNBC, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick expressed outrage after reading Fowler’s blog.
“What she describes is abhorrent and against everything Uber stands for and believes in,” Kalanick said. “It's the first time this has come to my attention so I have instructed Liane Hornsey our new Chief Human Resources Officer to conduct an urgent investigation into these allegations.”
Kalanick added that “we seek to make Uber a just workplace and there can be absolutely no place for this kind of behavior at Uber—and anyone who behaves this way or thinks this is OK will be fired.”
Arianna Huffington, an Uber board member, tweeted that there would be a ‘full investigation’ with Hornsey. She also asked for people to directly email her. Uber’s woes also are a sober reminder that Fowler’s experience and her inability to get HR to take her seriously is common in the tech industry, Tech Crunch reports.
A 2016 Elephant in the Valley report noted that 60% of women in the tech industry say they have been subject to unsolicited sexual advances. Uber also hired President Barack Obama’s former attorney general, Eric Holder, to investigate Fowler’s complaints, Reuters and NCB News report.
Holder “will conduct an independent review into the specific issues relating to the workplace environment raised by Susan Fowler, as well as diversity and inclusion at Uber more broadly,” Kalanick wrote in a memo to employees that Reuters obtained.