Susan Fowler Concepts

Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber

by Susan Fowler · 18 Feb 2020 · 205pp · 71,872 words

originally published on the author’s blog on February 19, 2017. www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber. Copyright © 2020 by Susan Rigetti Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for

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reader. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Names: Fowler, Susan J., author. Title: Whistleblower : my journey to Silicon Valley and fight for justice at Uber / Susan Fowler. Description: [New York] : Viking, [2020] | Identifiers: LCCN 2019034425 (print) | LCCN 2019034426 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525560128 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525560135 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Sexual harassment—California—Santa Clara

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on every high school transcript and taught myself the ones that I could figure out on my own. I typed up my own transcript, wrote “Susan Fowler Home School” at the top of each page, and listed every single “class” I had taught myself and every book and textbook that I had

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still being held back. It wasn’t right, and I wasn’t going to settle for it. “Dear President Gutmann,” I began. “My name is Susan Fowler.” I reminded her of her words at convocation and explained how they’d inspired me, then described the exasperating circumstances I was facing and asked

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blog post, Travis Kalanick and Uber hired Eric Holder, the former U.S. attorney general under President Obama, and Tammy Albarrán, a partner at the law firm Covington & Burling, to “conduct an independent review into the specific issues relating to the work place environment raised by Susan Fowler, as well as diversity and

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allow it. Yet another friend told me that at the end of his interview one of the lawyers demanded to know what exactly Susan Fowler might be planning next. If Uber employees declined to meet with the investigators or requested a lawyer, they were sternly reprimanded. One of the women from the LadyEng

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how ridiculous everything was. Such a strange experience. Such a strange year. ABOUT THE AUTHOR The technology op-ed editor at The New York Times, Susan Fowler has been named a "Person of the Year" by Time, The Financial Times, and the Webby Awards, and has appeared on Fortune's "40 under

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac · 2 Sep 2019 · 444pp · 127,259 words

title: “Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber.” Would anyone actually read this? Would anyone actually care? “It’s a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in my mind,” Susan Fowler wrote in the introductory paragraph of her blog post. “So

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somewhere close to $20 million. Mr. Michels made more off his $5,000 Uber investment than he did when Intel purchased his entire startup in 2013. PART Ⅳ Chapter 20 THREE MONTHS PRIOR Three and a half months before Susan Fowler hit “publish” on her blog post, the tech world had been thrown for

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were men, according to a later study. Raised in a small town in Arizona, she was an unlikely candidate for an engineering job at Uber. But for Susan Fowler, it was a dream come true. Like sailing “over the moon,” she would later tell a reporter. Fowler had worked at a pair of

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just over her eyes. She made people feel that she was excited to see them. It was hard not to return her wide smile when Susan Fowler gave you a warm “Hello!” Her outward sweetness belied a fire within; Fowler accomplished things she put her mind to. Whether it was writing

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path. It wasn’t all easy; she fumbled through a first semester at Penn, and advisors—skeptical of her education from the “Home School of Susan Fowler,” attempted to steer her away from studying physics. Fowler wasn’t having it. She called on the president of Penn, Amy Gutmann, and left a

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graduating in 2014 with a degree in physics and philosophy. And now, just a few years after leaving Penn, Susan Fowler was a site reliability engineer at Uber, the glittering unicorn of Silicon Valley. Uber represented an entirely new challenge: how to succeed in one of the most aggressive, most masculine, and most high

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an entrepreneur running his own startup, he didn’t like Uber and chose not to support it. Rigetti swore off using the app as a result. It was an omen Fowler would remember later. After two weeks of introductory training, Susan Fowler began work with her new team in December 2015. That

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at Uber and pasted them into her personal WordPress blog. The incident with her manager, her nightmare battles with the HR department, the leather jacket situation—all of it went into the post. She had no idea what would happen after she hit publish, if anything were to happen at all. Susan Fowler

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manager came on to yet another Uber employee, who again reported him to management. He was terminated and left the company in April 2016. Chapter 23 ...THE HARDER THEY FALL Travis Kalanick woke up to an iPhone on nuclear meltdown. Within hours, the link to Susan Fowler’s blog post had been shared

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leading law firm Covington & Burling—will conduct an independent review into the specific issues relating to the work place environment raised by Susan Fowler, as well as diversity and inclusion at Uber more broadly . . . Second, Arianna is flying out to join me and Liane [Hornsey, Director of HR] at our all hands meeting

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cede the regular mail to Amazon if Bezos wanted it. Chapter 24 NO ONE STEALS FROM LARRY PAGE At the end of 2016, months before Susan Fowler’s blog post, Travis Kalanick had a different problem brewing: forty miles south of San Francisco, Larry Page was fuming. Anthony Levandowski—his star

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Jones took it upon himself to study the root of the hatred of Uber’s brand, something he hadn’t anticipated before he joined. Jones knew people thought Travis was an asshole, but he wasn’t prepared for this. Susan Fowler’s blog post had made things exponentially worse. The Waymo lawsuit—which

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to the confrontation between Hazelbaker and Kalanick recalled the communications executive using far more colorful vocabulary during the encounter. Chapter 25 GREYBALL A week after Susan Fowler’s blog post exploded across the Valley and the front pages of newspapers worldwide, I got a telephone call from a number I didn’t

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the incident. She knew how awful the bro-friendly culture of tech companies and venture capital could be for women. But after she read about Susan Fowler, about what happened in India, about the torrent of other scandals flooding out about Kalanick, Lake felt ashamed for her company to be spoken

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s leash”: Emily Chang, “Uber Investor Shervin Pishevar Accused of Sexual Misconduct by Multiple Women,” Bloomberg, November 30, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-01/uber-investor-shervin-pishevar-accused-of-sexual-misconduct-by-multiple-women. 196 “Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber”: Susan Fowler, “Reflecting on One Very

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, Very Strange Year at Uber,” Susan J. Fowler (blog), February 19, 2017, https://www.susanjfowler.com

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.net/2017/3/28/15087184/uber-diversity-numbers-first-three-million. 213 Like sailing “over the moon”: Maureen Dowd, “She’s 26, and Brought Down Uber’s C.E.O. What’s Next?,” New York Times, October 21, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/21/style/susan-fowler-uber.html. 215 “I don’t

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270 “He definitely has my confidence”: Anita Balakrishnan, “Uber Board Member Arianna Huffington Says She’s Been Emailing Ex-Engineer About Harassment Claims,” CNBC, March 3, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/03/arianna-huffington-travis-kalanick-confidence-emailing-susan-fowler.html. 273 “Uber has a long way to go”: Emil Michael, “Email

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination

by Adam Lashinsky · 31 Mar 2017 · 190pp · 62,941 words

been punished or kicked off the platform. The sentiment also reached into the workforce of Uber itself. In February 2017, a former Uber engineer named Susan Fowler posted a story online titled “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber.” She described allegations of having been sexually harassed by her male superior and then

The Passenger

by AA.VV. · 23 May 2022 · 192pp · 59,615 words

recall that this, too, was born in Silicon Valley and only later did it roll downhill to Hollywood. It all started in early 2017 when Susan Fowler, an Uber employee, wrote a post – which later grew into a well-known book, Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley

by Emily Chang · 6 Feb 2018 · 334pp · 104,382 words

the company due to inappropriate behavior. Setting all this in motion was a young engineer at Uber, Susan Fowler, who accused her manager of propositioning her for sex. Her memo, remarkably, led to a companywide investigation of Uber’s bro culture that revealed forty-seven cases of sexual harassment, resulting in the departure of

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from shattered. 4 THE TIPPING POINT: WOMEN ENGINEERS SPEAK OUT ON FEBRUARY 19, 2017, a young engineer named Susan Fowler published a scathing blog post about sexual harassment she had experienced while working at Uber. She posted it on her personal blog, but it almost immediately went viral. Social media exploded with rage

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couple of mothers in the group sympathized with—and the room quieted. My first question got straight to the point: “What do you think of Susan Fowler?” After a few moments of silence, and a little encouragement from me, the women began to weigh in. “It’s frustrating to hear so

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by day.” Medina had worked on the SRE team with Fowler at Uber and backed up the legitimacy of her story. Leah McGowen-Hare, an executive at Salesforce, likened the shock she heard from men in response to Susan Fowler’s post to the horror expressed by white liberals after the 2016 U

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little promise of a positive resolution at the end. UNWANTED ADVANCES, 24/7 When I asked if anyone in the room wanted to share a “Susan Fowler” type of experience, Laura Holmes, senior product manager at Google, was the first to speak up. She hesitated as she started to tell the

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there hasn’t been any way to quantify the harassment, sexism, and amorphous “bro culture” in the tech industry. People could dismiss misogynistic stories like Susan Fowler’s as one-offs, exceptions and not the rule. But in 2016, a group of industry insiders, in conjunction with Stanford University, published a survey

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board of directors hired Expedia’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, as the ride hailer’s new chief executive. “Susan Fowler’s story has been a catalyst for meaningful, positive change at Uber,” a company spokesperson told me. “We’re grateful for her courage to speak out, which has led to major cultural shifts

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women as sex pawns and founder hounders can’t help but affect weekday views of women as colleagues, entrepreneurs, and peers. HACKING MONOGAMY Remember Susan Fowler, the former Uber engineer who blogged that her manager brought up his nonmonogamous relationship as a way to make a pass at her over the internal company

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in that bar in Seoul—it is not hard to imagine how this might poison company culture and lead cases like Susan Fowler’s to be overlooked. Again, an external investigation documented forty-seven claims of sexual harassment at Uber. I reached out to Emil Michael about five months after he had left

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Though the tech community didn’t invent polyamory, it has certainly adopted it. There’s reportedly even a poly meet-up group at Google. But Susan Fowler’s case is just one example of how the “we’re so cool about sex” culture can create confusion that can bleed into the workplace

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took a report from the former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder for Uber to move its dinner offering from 8:15 to 7:00 p.m. Holder was tasked with critiquing the company’s culture after Susan Fowler’s accusation of sexual harassment came to light. Holder noted that an earlier

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see brought to life here. Natalie Bonifede, another GWC alum, helped orchestrate the incredible dinner with women engineers at my home in the wake of Susan Fowler’s explosive blog post, as well as the meet-up with the young female coders, two high points of this entire journey. Hearing these women

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Bloomberg, but the vast majority are original interviews that were conducted for the purposes of this book. These include interviews with Sheryl Sandberg, Marissa Mayer, Susan Fowler, Niniane Wang, Ellen Pao, Katrina Lake, Reid Hoffman, Evan Williams, Dick Costolo, Max Levchin, Stewart Butterfield, John Doerr, and so many more. I also

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15/20-unconventional-books-that-changed-my-life. “He was trying to stay”: Fowler, “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber.” claimed that a “smear campaign”: Susan Fowler, “Research for the smear campaign has begun. If you are contacted by anyone asking for personal and intimate info about me, please report

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Behind a Smear Campaign Against Ex-employee Susan Fowler Rigetti,” TechCrunch, Feb. 24, 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/24/uber-says-its-absolutely-not-behind-a-smear-campaign-against-ex-employee

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-susan-fowler-rigetti. “Yeah, we call that Boob-er”: Mickey Rapkin, “Uber Cab Confessions,” GQ, Feb. 27, 2014, https://www.gq

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

by Clive Thompson · 26 Mar 2019 · 499pp · 144,278 words

, a more social thing now.” There’s even been some pushback to the frat-house-style culture of many Silicon Valley firms. Consider Uber: In February 2017, the programmer Susan Fowler single-handedly shone a light into its culture, with a blog post describing “one very, very strange year” of working there. The

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, no. 2 (February 2017): 4–7. a “high leverage point”: Rushkoff, Program or Be Programmed, 133. “one very, very strange year”: Susan Fowler, “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber,” SusanJFowler.com, February 19, 2017, accessed August 19, 2018, https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work

by Alex Rosenblat · 22 Oct 2018 · 343pp · 91,080 words

after banding together in order to create 1 million jobs for women by 2020, after the UN realized that Uber is associated with undermining labor protections and hurting marginalized workers.65 Additionally, in 2017, a former Uber engineer, Susan Fowler, penned a firsthand account of the sexual harassment she experienced while she worked at

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the 2017 spring roundup of Uber’s failings, including the sexual harassment scandals86 that culminated in the departure of Travis Kalanick,87 the company selected Dallas and Dubai as the cities where it planned to launch flying cars in 2020.88 Just a few months after Susan Fowler’s sexual harassment allegations, lawmakers

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jsf?num=C-434/15. 65. Charlotte Alter, “UN Women Breaks Off Partnership with Uber,” Time, March 23, 2015, http://time.com/3754537/un-women-breaks-off-partnership-with-uber/. 66. Susan Fowler, “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber,” Susan Fowler (blog), February 19, 2017, www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on

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-one-very-strange-year-at-uber. 67. Ibid. 68. Sarah Lacy, “Susan Fowler Did This,” Pando, June 12, 2017, https://pando.

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com/2017/06/12/susan-fowler-did/. 69. Sara Ashley O’Brien, “Backlash

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/2017/04/23/technology/travis-kalanick-pushes-uber-and-himself-to-the-precipice.html. 85. Julia Carrie Wong, “Uber’s ‘Hustle-Oriented’ Culture Becomes a Black Mark on Employees’ Résumés,” The Guardian, March 7, 2017, www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/07/uber-work-culture-travis-kalanick-susan-fowler-controversy. 86. Susan J. Fowler, “

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Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber,” February 19, 2017, Susan Fowler (blog), www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at

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-uber. 87. Kara Swisher, “With Her Blog Post about Toxic Bro-Culture at Uber, Susan Fowler Proved That One Person Can Make a Difference,” ReCode, June

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21, 2017, www.recode.net/2017/6/21/15844852/uber-toxic-bro-company-culture-susan-fowler

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employment vs. part-time employment classification, 8 sexual assault, 161, 175, 194 sexual harassment: driver experiences of, 139–40, 147–48, 194; Susan Fowler’s experience with, 188, 195–96; Uber’s policy on, 140, 147, 188, 193, 243n4 sharing economy: alternate terms for, 227n38; definition of, 224n2; employment statistics in, 203–4

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

by W. David Marx · 18 Nov 2025 · 642pp · 142,332 words

a $50,000 contest to find technological fixes for misinformation on WhatsApp. * * * On February 19, 2017, twenty-five-year-old engineer Susan Fowler published an essay about a “very, very strange year” at Uber, the ride-sharing company that had redefined urban transportation and symbolized the new app economy. Just three years earlier

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-with-misinformation-in-india/articleshow/64889026.cms [inactive]. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “very strange year”: “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber,” Susan Fowler (blog), February 19, 2017, https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech

by Sara Wachter-Boettcher · 9 Oct 2017 · 223pp · 60,909 words

happens when an organization decides to do things differently. THE MERITOCRACY MELTDOWN On a fall day in 2015, Susan Fowler showed up for her first day of work as a site reliability engineer at Uber. She was thrilled: her department was new, her coworkers were smart, and she was told she could

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.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/10/is-silicon-valley-a-meritocracy/503948. 10. Susan J. Fowler, “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber,” Susan J. Fowler (blog), February 19, 2017, https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at

Unleashed

by Anne Morriss and Frances Frei · 1 Jun 2020 · 394pp · 57,287 words

shortly after the company appeared to take advantage of a taxi strike in response to President Trump’s travel ban. A few months later, Uber engineer Susan Fowler blogged about her experience of harassment and discrimination in a culture she convincingly portrayed as ruthless.1 Footage then emerged of Kalanick interacting with an

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know when you’re at a cultural moment of truth? The trite answer is that people will often tell you. When Susan Fowler endured her very, very strange year at Uber, she reported her experiences internally well before she chose to share them publicly.8 The facts of her case never made it

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Joint Chiefs of Staff, Washington, DC, April 2012. 8. Gallup, State of the Global Workforce (New York: Gallup Press, 2017). Chapter 2 1. Susan Fowler, “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber,” Susan Fowler (blog), February 19, 2017, https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at

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Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility (USA: Silicon Guild, 2017). 7. Mike Isaac, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2019), 265. 8. Anyone who cares about getting culture right should read Susan Fowler, Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at