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Horrific story goes viral: Ex-Uber employee shares nightmare of workplace sexism

An ex-engineer just published a horrific experience she had working at Uber.

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#DeleteUber is in the news again. And this time, for a 3000-word detailed, horrific story titled, “Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber” by former employee Susan Fowler. She talks about the alleged sexual harassment and gender bias during her time at the company.

According to Fowler’s account, she joined Uber as a site reliability engineer (SRE) back in November 2015. 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."

She immediately took screenshots and sent it to her HR. However, to her surprise, the Upper management told her that that manager '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 mentioned that she was simply offered two choices. “I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or 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.”

She chose to leave that team and joined a new SRE team. But, based on interactions with other women engineers, she realized that she wasn’t the only one who was a victim. She writes, “Some of the women even had stories about reporting the exact same manager I had reported, and had reported inappropriate interactions with him long before I had even joined the company.” It was clear that all complaints were simply ignored.

Eventually, the supervisor left the company. She wasn’t sure if he was fired though. She mentions, “There was a game-of-thrones political war raging within the ranks of upper management in the infrastructure engineering organization.”

Shortly after Fowler’s blogpost went viral, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick ordered an "urgent investigation" into the matter. "What's described here is abhorrent (and) against everything we believe in. Anyone who behaves this way or thinks this is OK will be fired," Kalanick said on Twitter. The Uber case is likely to revive debates over sexism in male-dominated Silicon Valley. 

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