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Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

nytimes.com

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Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#381

Post by ethbro »

aioprisan wrote: post #322
ethbro wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also point out the possibility that Uber HR has no power... or upper HR management (formerly Renee Atwood, now Liane Hornsey?) is complicit. They have a management chain just like everyone else, and if the person at the top (or the person above them) says "We're not going to discipline this guy" then the best HR can do is try to deescalate the situation.

If true that HR has no power (and it's starting to look like that's the case), then it's clear that the company culture itself it so rotten as to remove any accountability chain just for the sake of a few (sexual predator) engineers spinning out a few more features that will make the company a few (or a lot) more dollars. Shame!

I already deleted the shortcut off my launcher. We'll see how going Lyft-only for a while works.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#382

Post by nkoren »

kyledrake wrote: post #266
nkoren wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Blacklisting employees for reasons like this is unbelievably crazy illegal, just so everyone knows. I strongly encourage anyone with knowledge of or possessing any such blacklists to blow the whistle on this, hard.

Oh yeah, it's not remotely legal by any standard whatsoever. The problem is that it's virtually impossible to prove.

In my friend's case, she was at the director level of a large publicly-traded company. Particularly as you approach the top of the that kind of corporate hierarchy, the world becomes very small, and good-old-boy dynamics start to dominate. There's no formal blacklist, of course -- just the opportunity to meet your frenemy from her previous employer down at the bar, where he can confidentially warn you to "watch out for that one: she's a troublemaker". Nothing more needs to be said, and certainly nothing needs to be written.

I suspect that hiring decisions at lower levels will be both more process-driven and better-documented, so it might be more possible to prove the existence of blacklists there (even if it's still far from easy). But near the top of the pyramid, I have great trouble seeing how the punitive legal action can realistically be used to break up the good-old-boy network.

Seeing this play out has actually changed my mind on the necessity of having gender quotas for management and boards. Previously I'd been opposed on vaguely libertarian grounds; now I see it as the only practical way of disrupting the good-old-boy networks that genuinely do a lot of harm. (Society is genuinely damaged -- depriving itself of so much talent -- by systematic bias against women).

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#383

Post by yummyfajitas »

ebbv wrote: post #357
yummyfajitas wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What actually happened: "Emil was pushing Ben to answer why it was OK for journalists to publish false stories or attack a businessperson’s personal life. Ben was quiet. It was a pretty normal conversation about hypotheticals. There was no malice or yelling or fighting. It was a chat between the two of them that I happened to overhear. The last comment that I heard was when Emil hypothesized about creating a coalitio…

HuffPo should be disqualified as a source regarding Uber. As stated in the NYT piece, Arianna Huffington is on Uber's board. She has a clear interest in shining as positive a light as possible on Uber at all times.

Ok. Lets imagine Emil actually did exactly as described in his hypothetical: hiring people to investigate true facts and report them to the public.

How is that somehow worse than Gawker hiring people to do that to Uber?

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#384

Post by mcguire »

Joeri wrote: post #372
brudgers wrote: post #352

As I commented last night[1], the New York Times has cast Fowler's experience as a he-said-she-said story. Unfortunately I was not pessimistic enough: 1. The New York Times spiked the most damning part of Fowler's story: that HR was actively involved in supporting the behavior. 2. It down plays Fowler's specific experience as typical for the industry and marginalizes it by bringing Pao's story into Fowler's narrative…

Were you there when the alleged facts happened? If not, it is definitely he-said-she-said. It is probable that things happened as Fowler claims, but we have no way of knowing without evidence. The article mentions the facts, which are basically who said what, since neither side has shared any evidence. Personally I'm not going to pass judgment either way without knowing more, but this is definitely going into my some…

http://bit.ly/2kCE416

She claims to have a record of all of the events, although she (rightly) didn't post them.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#385

Post by cbtacy »

brudgers wrote: post #352

As I commented last night[1], the New York Times has cast Fowler's experience as a he-said-she-said story. Unfortunately I was not pessimistic enough: 1. The New York Times spiked the most damning part of Fowler's story: that HR was actively involved in supporting the behavior. 2. It down plays Fowler's specific experience as typical for the industry and marginalizes it by bringing Pao's story into Fowler's narrative…

So profoundly disappointed in not just the NY Times but all the media coverage. The story is not that Travis has ordered an investigation - it's that Uber is a cesspool. And for those who are saying "do you have evidence" - please... Like we ALL don't know what working at Uber is like. Cmon man.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#386

Post by mcguire »

brudgers wrote: post #352

As I commented last night[1], the New York Times has cast Fowler's experience as a he-said-she-said story. Unfortunately I was not pessimistic enough: 1. The New York Times spiked the most damning part of Fowler's story: that HR was actively involved in supporting the behavior. 2. It down plays Fowler's specific experience as typical for the industry and marginalizes it by bringing Pao's story into Fowler's narrative…

Neither the NYT nor Reuters articles mention the other 90% of the alleged activities:

http://bit.ly/2kCE416

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#387

Post by cbtacy »

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…

Let me guess.... You're male, yeah? Sit down and be quiet please - you're not helping.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#388

Post by jimmywanger »

bravura wrote: post #263
aisofteng wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>She just wrote down what happened to her What she _said_ happened to her. Nobody has corroborated and she has presented no evidence. It may well have happened, and would be rightfully a scandal about deplorable behavior if it did - but there is nothing so far besides just this one person's blog post which she herself says multiple others _can_ corroborate.

'If you are saying things like “We can’t really know what happened” and extra-specially pleading on behalf of the extra-special Woody Allen, then you are saying that his innocence is more presumptive than hers. You are saying that he is on trial, not her: he deserves judicial safeguards in the court of public opinion, but she does not. The damnably difficult thing about all of this, of course, is that you can’t presu…

Nobody is assuming she's lying.

However, libel laws are in place for a reason. If all it takes is an accusation of impropriety for people to treat the accused as actually guilty, well, that's not justice.

And it's a hell of a leap from "sexual harassment" to "rape". And to bring any sort of culture into this is laughable. I don't see anybody rushing to the defense of Uber if these allegations are actually true.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#389

Post by logicallee »

Joeri wrote: post #372
brudgers wrote: post #352

As I commented last night[1], the New York Times has cast Fowler's experience as a he-said-she-said story. Unfortunately I was not pessimistic enough: 1. The New York Times spiked the most damning part of Fowler's story: that HR was actively involved in supporting the behavior. 2. It down plays Fowler's specific experience as typical for the industry and marginalizes it by bringing Pao's story into Fowler's narrative…

Were you there when the alleged facts happened? If not, it is definitely he-said-she-said. It is probable that things happened as Fowler claims, but we have no way of knowing without evidence. The article mentions the facts, which are basically who said what, since neither side has shared any evidence. Personally I'm not going to pass judgment either way without knowing more, but this is definitely going into my some…

Maybe the reporter didn't read the blog post, because it was beyond his attention span. Honestly, it just sounds like an editor assigned him to report.

If he had read it he wouldn't have summarized it as "a lengthy post on her personal blog": he would have written that Fowler wrote about her experiences which began " 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." After she rightfully brought this to the attention of HR, she was told "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." with no further penalties or reprimand. That latter part is what's shocking, that she was told her performance would be reviewed poorly, even though she was very qualified (this team was the best fit for her and the work she wanted to do.)

She also wrote that HR told her regarding such complaints that they were first-time offenses, though she heard the same experience from multiple women.

In her account she didn't talk about harassment much (except the one incident) and instead said that she was given poor reviews (changed after she saw that the performance reviews were good) in order to keep from transferring. A lot of the blog post was about the lack of responsiveness by HR.

Her biggest issue was the way in which women were driven out. The important quote is "When I joined Uber, the organization I was part of was over 25% women. By the time I was trying to transfer to another eng organization, this number had dropped down to less than 6%" and then at the end that "Out of over 150 engineers in the SRE teams, only 3% were women."

Instead of reading her blog post and reporting on it, the reporter simply reported without reading, in a cookie-cutter way. (Or it certainly reads that way.)

Having read the source yesterday (along with everyone else here), I don't like the reporter's summary at all.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#390

Post by nkoren »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #383
ebbv wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HuffPo should be disqualified as a source regarding Uber. As stated in the NYT piece, Arianna Huffington is on Uber's board. She has a clear interest in shining as positive a light as possible on Uber at all times.

Ok. Lets imagine Emil actually did exactly as described in his hypothetical: hiring people to investigate true facts and report them to the public. How is that somehow worse than Gawker hiring people to do that to Uber?

When those "true facts" are the personal details of journalists and their families, researched and published specifically to make them fear for their safety.

If you think that maliciously doxing people is perfectly fine as long as the dox are true facts, then you are a being a troll. If I have misunderstood your point, then I apologise and would appreciate clarification.

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