Former Uber engineer says company ignored repeated reports of sexual harassment

Susan Fowler, a former site reliability engineer for Uber and current engineer at Stripe, accused the company of rampant sexual harassment and human resources negligence in a blog post published today. 

Fowler claims that on her first day out of training, she was solicited for sex by a superior on an internal company chat thread. She then immediately captured screenshots of the messages and sent them to Uber’s human resources department. In a healthy organization, such a problem would have been quickly resolved. But Fowler alleges that the harassment only continued, preventing her from moving up within the company.

“Upper management told me that he ‘was a high performer’ and they wouldn’t feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part,” explained Fowler in her post

At this point, Fowler says in her post that she was given a choice of remaining on the team and accepting, “a poor performance review,” or moving to a different team.

“I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or (ii) I could stay on the team, but I would have to understand that he would most likely give me a poor performance review when review time came around, and there was nothing they could do about that,” further explained Fowler.

Though she didn’t want to leave the role she felt she was best prepared to fill, she switched teams. Work continued, and while Fowler had settled into the new role she regularly had conversations with female employees who shared similar stories about HR negligence, even citing unacceptable experiences with the same superior that solicited her. Along with a number of her colleagues, Fowler met once again with HR to make the point that the experiences of harassment were epidemic. Fowler then says that Uber insisted that the manager had only been accused of a single offense.

Amid chaotic internal politics, Fowler attempted to transfer to a different department, but the company blocked her request. Citing strong performance, she couldn’t understand why her request had been denied.

“I was told that ‘performance problems aren’t always something that has to do with work, but sometimes can be about things outside of work or your personal life,'” added Fowler in her post.

She ultimately decided to stay in the same role until her next performance review. But the frustration continued with a second reassignment rejection and a further explanation that her “review had been changed after the fact,” and that she didn’t show “signs of an upward career trajectory.” As a result, she was shut out of a Stanford computer science graduate program sponsored by the company for high-achievers.