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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

#171

Post by beachy »

thewhitetulip wrote: post #113
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The "HR is not your friend" trope gets thrown out a lot, but in cases where your goals align with the company's (i.e. you don't want to get harassed, and the company doesn't want to get sued), HR is the place you should be able to go.

> Should be able to go Yes, in theory. But most HRs "protect the org" in the most short sighted way possible

That's a sweeping statement that I utterly disagree with.

We do HR software, I've interacted with many HR people at many companies and I've never even heard of anything as outrageous as the behavior described in this case. In no way is it the way"most HRs" behave.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#172

Post by skc »

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.

OT but I've been wondering about this. I work in South Africa and have done so for some really big corporates as well as small boutique companies.

Without fail, every HR department has been the one department where you will find the majority of staff are women.

I don't know if this is the same everywhere else in the world, but it strikes me as particularly insidious in this Uber case where, in an obviously apparent misogynistic culture, a female employee is having to report these issues to a female HR rep who in turn is being forced to toe whatever dubious, unwritten company line Uber works under.

I mean this passage here...

" She then asked me if women engineers at Uber were friends and talked a lot, and then asked me how often we communicated, what we talked about, what email addresses we used to communicate, which chat rooms we frequented, etc."

...made my skin crawl.

I just think HR in general is an extremely subversive environment.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#173

Post by bflesch »

I find it disconcerning that they did regular performance reviews, and she aparrently scored very highly on them. But later those ratings were discounted by some "hidden" factor.

Why would I waste time on performance reviews when I'm not openly giving feedback to the employee? How can an organization efficiently distribute team members based on metrics derived from performance reviews when there is such an impactful but undocumented component of the review?

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#174

Post by fullshark »

xor1 wrote: post #85
blazespin wrote: post #8

The problem is that men misconstrue the natural social and friendly tendency of most women as sexual advances. There needs to be more education in this respect with men. Just because a woman is chatty and willing to collaborate doesn't mean she wants to sleep with you. I know that sounds sexist, but honestly, I think women just are naturally or at least culturally (does the difference matter in this case, really?) mo…

>I think women just are naturally or at least culturally (does the difference matter in this case, really?) more social This is really sexist.

Do you think there are any gender differences re: personality traits?

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#175

Post by rodgerd »

mistercow wrote: post #102
thinkloop wrote: post #51

These are allegations by one party against another with zero data either way, why is everyone on the anti-uber bandwagon.

Sooner or later, the truth is going to come out. Fowler knows this. There's no room for ambiguity here: either Uber has broken the law extravagantly , or she's lying. If the latter is true, she will be crucified for it. The defamation suit alone would be monumental. And again, there's no ambiguity. She says she has extensive records of this behavior. That's not something she can really walk back. In a situation where…

> she will be crucified for it.

She'll be crucified for saying bad things about a man in tech regardless. As we can see from the recently created accounts revving up the accusations of lying to promote her book.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#176

Post by patmcguire »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #29

>Ms. Fowler’s account is another sign of Silicon Valley’s struggle with women’s issues and diversity in a male-dominated engineering environment. That's a hell of a claim since this is a "typical corporate America" type of problem.

Eh, the first incident struck me as pretty standard up until transfer or be punished, it's usually transfer or deal with it the first time. Not that that justifies it, just that's how it would play out. Everything else is way, way out of the ordinary for typical corporate America.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#177

Post by discodave »

muglug wrote: post #125
camdenlock wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's trendy right now to "listen and believe." Outrage can score you some serious Internet popularity points, particularly when your claims are about men being sexist pigs. Don't ask for any evidence, just grab the pitchforks! That being said, it's tempting to just believe everything Fowler wrote and hope for sweet justice. We all love a good story, after all. Unfortunately, what makes for a gripping story of justice…

She's staked her reputation (and, at this point, probably her career as well) on not lying about the harassment. She says she has both documentary evidence and other female Uber employees to back up her claims. "Guilty until proven innocent" is how our courts work, and rightly so. But, as a layperson, there's nothing wrong in assessing the evidence and saying: "the chance these claims are false is vanishingly small,…

I think you accidentally a word (or you don't understand how courts work in the US).

:)

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#178

Post by benchaney »

tomlock wrote: post #167
benchaney wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you can't dispute his claims with evidence so you are just going to insist that women would be offended by them. Seems legit.

I'm sorry. What evidence would be sufficient?

It depends on what claim you want to dispute, but insisting that women would be offended by what he said certainly isn't sufficient.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#179

Post by zatkin »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #100
jacobolus wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you‘re interested in what you call “corporations of people”, one classic sociology paper is about Medici Florence, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~snijders/PadgettAnsell1993.pdf

That is an awesome read! Thanks for the link. A bit long but it articulates the notions of structural control much more clearly than I did.

Not to stand in Uber's defense, but it wouldn't surprise me if they end up not firing anyone over this. At the end of the day, they run a business, and one misconduct like this could make investors unhappy.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#180

Post by throwawaymaroon »

tomlock wrote: post #159
throwawaymaroon wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yich. pointing out that we're an audience without legal standing, playing with pitchforks, is not harassment or condoning harassment.

That's the sound your lady friends would be making if they knew the moral imperative you felt after reading that blog post was to defend the judicial system from comments on this website.

as a leftist... I can only feel the left is fucked.

on the other hand, I am arguing in a thread that contains that complete altrightgarbletwat banned below.

on the other other hand, your aggrieved-on-behalf-of-my-lady-friends stance is just so freaking overwrought and gross.

you're attacking a position that no one has advocated for, with the exception of the altrightgarbletwat. go bug him.

and final edit: by the way, the moral imperative I advocate for is to burn these companies to the ground and to scald capitalists with their own failures. it wouldn't matter to me if Uber managed a PR save here because Uber's shitty heart will not change and nothing of value will be lost when it dies.

do you get it? a system will do the bare minimum to exonerate itself and continue perpetuating the SV failures of greed and misplaced tech idealism: there's no story here because it doesn't fucking surprise anyone clued when someone comes out with yet another harassment story in tech and it doesn't fucking mean anything when some token firings take place over the next few weeks.

Uber will still be a piece of shit unsustainable company in a tech world coopted by greedy would-be visionaries, hopefully destined for the scrap heap in the near future.

my lady friends don't need you here. read up on performative allyship and then check a mirror.

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