Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee • Hacker News Board

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#291

Post by adekok » Mon, Feb 20, 2017, 2:07 PM UTC

random_upvoter wrote: post #185

As a meta, it seems to be an infallible rule of Hacker News that any discussion about the relationship between men and women turns into an angry painful mess in no time. Maybe we should look into this anger itself rather than draw all sorts of conclusions from cases of which we don't know half of what really happened.

It's similar to conversations between conservatives and liberals. Both groups have implicit assumptions about how the world works. They have implicit value judgements, in preferring one thing versus another.

Conversation almost never describes these implicit assumptions. As a result, each side ends up thinking that the other side is stupid, obtuse, biased, etc.

Getting to the underlying biases is hard.

As evidence, see any number of newspaper headlines, including this one:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/donald-t...

Ignoring the Trump bit, the headline says "kills 30 civilians, including 10 women and children"

Now, try to prove that the male / female victims were treated equally. And, that there is no implicit bias in male / female relationships.

I'm not saying that such bias is good, bad, or ugly. I'm saying it exists. And it underlies a lot of conversations, without anyone realizing it.

Which goes a long way to explaining why things end up as you pointed out.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#292

Post by adekok » Mon, Feb 20, 2017, 2:08 PM UTC

dkarapetyan wrote: post #9

I've always wondered if the high profile fallout actually causes any change. From anecdotal evidence I feel like nothing really changes. It's mostly people in some bubble that get really upset and then a week later everyone forgets what exactly they were upset about.

> I've always wondered if the high profile fallout actually causes any change

Underlying personality disorders are a relatively constant percentage of society. Barring near-universal awareness of these disorders and how to counteract them, no, nothing will change until human nature changes.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#293

Post by pitaj » Mon, Feb 20, 2017, 2:08 PM UTC

ygjb wrote: post #127

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What?? Everywhere I worked a screenshot like what she's describing would get you fired. Over office chat even?? It's not even hearsay. Someone can bring up the exact chat history.

That's great! It sounds like you have worked at places that follow the rules. Please don't use your personal observations to discount the growing collection of evidence that this sort of thing is happening at tech companies around the world, and not just in the bay area.

Is there a centralized repository of this evidence? If not, maybe that would be a good thing to create as a reference.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#294

Post by pmiller2 » Mon, Feb 20, 2017, 2:09 PM UTC

pmiller2 wrote: post #247

AYBABTME wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may seem hard to understand why one wouldn't go to a lawyer, but think about this: Consider that the people who are wronged in these situations didn't set themselves those days to be harassed. Now they should not only stand what's been done to them, but also drop everything they were doing that day to sue? I think there's an understandable tradeoff that people go thru in those circumstance. They push the issue as…

I agree with everybody who's pointing out the time, effort, and cost of suing. In this case, I think consulting a lawyer to negotiate a severance agreement might have worked well, but that would have essentially negated her ability to write this blow post. I'm glad she chose to write the post as a service to the tech community rather than seek a big payout.

/s/blow/blog/

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#295

Post by StreamBright » Mon, Feb 20, 2017, 2:09 PM UTC

dclowd9901 wrote: post #36

gkoberger wrote: post #19

One thing that every employee needs to understand is that HR is not your friend. No matter how friendly or helpful they seem, their job is not to protect you. It's to protect the company.

Sure they're not your friend, but Jesus Christ, the amount of legal trouble this particular HR establishment exposed themselves to through their actions is breathtaking. THAT'S their job: to prevent the company from getting sued!! In this case I'm completely bewildered as to why HR handled this particular situation so clumsily.

Essentially they opened up the company for a class action lawsuit.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#296

Post by employee8000 » Mon, Feb 20, 2017, 2:18 PM UTC

ewwertee2454 wrote: post #153

deminature wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suing is a surefire pathway to being made a pariah, case in point Ellen Pao. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pao_v._Kleiner_Perkins

> ...pa ... I understand that English has absorbed that word and its meaning in the current sense. But please don't use that word. That is like the n-word in south india. It is specifically used to refer to people in a derogatory way.

Pariah is a perfectly valid and non-offensive word.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#297

Post by metaphorm » Mon, Feb 20, 2017, 2:19 PM UTC

jordigh wrote: post #273

hueving wrote: post #233

>Ms. Fowler’s account is another sign of Silicon Valley’s struggle with women’s issues and diversity in a male-dominated engineering environment. In 2015, the venture capital world was put under the microscope when Ellen Pao, a former partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, claimed in a lawsuit that she was discriminated against at the blue-chip venture firm because of her gender — a case she lost. This paragrap…

> where a jury decided she was wrong. A jury didn't decide she was wrong. That's not what juries do. A jury decided that they couldn't all unanimously agree beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was right. Just because a jury doesn't convict doesn't mean the problem didn't happen. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/03/ellen-pao-and-t...

it was a civil suit, not a criminal trial. Ellen Pao was the plaintiff. The jury determined she didn't make a convincing case.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#298

Post by sjg007 » Mon, Feb 20, 2017, 2:21 PM UTC

enneff wrote: post #158

aisofteng wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citations not needed. There are allegations, nothing more. If this happened to me, I would find the moral import of the matter significant to the point that it would not occur to me to use it to plug my book. This may well be an endemic issue at this company, and it does seem that these sorts of situations do in fact exist in some places, but so far there is only one person's story's and without proof.

My interpretation was that the "citation needed" was in reference to "we have seen similar claims before that have turned out to be false or exaggerated greatly".

Yep

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#299

Post by koolba » Mon, Feb 20, 2017, 2:21 PM UTC

StreamBright wrote: post #295

dclowd9901 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure they're not your friend, but Jesus Christ, the amount of legal trouble this particular HR establishment exposed themselves to through their actions is breathtaking. THAT'S their job: to prevent the company from getting sued!! In this case I'm completely bewildered as to why HR handled this particular situation so clumsily.

Essentially they opened up the company for a class action lawsuit.

Are there even enough women there to form a class?

There's no legal minimum but it's more difficult to form a class with a handful of people.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#300

Post by marcusgarvey » Mon, Feb 20, 2017, 2:26 PM UTC

nkoren wrote: post #244

xiphias wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure..the thing I don't understand is why she didn't go to a lawyer? That would have been the next logical step for me. At least 1 person should get to prison if there is enough evidence collected by multiple women.

A friend of mine experienced a somewhat worse level of harassment at her job. She lawyered up and quickly received an offer for a non-trivial silver parachute, and a mutual non-disparagement agreement on her way out the door. Seemed like a fine solution, but it soon became evident that she had, in fact, been blacklisted: 18 months passed before anybody would even give her an interview, and that was only after decidin…

I believe that blacklisting is something that happens in cases like this, and I wonder how it gets coordinated. Especially when there's no public record of a court case. Simply that every time her previous employer was called for a reference, they gave her an unflattering one? Or is it more proactive, like some sort of list that's known in the HR world of certain industries?