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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

#401

Post by ryandrake »

cbtacy wrote: post #385
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.

Only in the court of public opinion does "Cmon man--you know it's true" hold any value. On the whole it's not looking very good for Uber, but it's hard to say with any certainty until facts materialize.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#402

Post by dang »

aisofteng wrote: post #60

> If they will discipline and fire people and put processes in place to keep the problem fixed You're assuming that that allegations are true. They have been neither proven nor corroborated, and the author advertises her book in her post. Edit: This comment has gone strongly negative in the matter of minutes. I offered no opinion and only stated fact; either there is vote manipulation on HN, or at least some portion…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13684627 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#403

Post by Consultant32452 »

st3v3r wrote: post #360
Neliquat wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it clearly benefits current and future victims to be taken seriously and get any help they may need? Yes, in my opinion. But that is a much more personal ethics call.

Except telling someone like the OP who clearly is not the kind of person that would believe the victim or try to get any help, and instead launch into a cross examination isn't going to do that. All that's going to do is make the victim feel even worse, and possibly discourage her from getting help or reporting at all.

The fundamental principle of the American justice system is that we should be skeptical of all claims of wrong-doing. The appropriate response to these claims is to ask for evidence and in its absence potentially educate the claimant on how to properly collect evidence. I'm sure there's a lot of legitimate claims out there, and most of them will not result in justice. However, rampant speculation based on Twitter anecdotes is never going to be helpful.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#404

Post by brudgers »

Tloewald wrote: post #363
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…

I'm curious as to whether you're complaining about the story. What do you mean by "spiked"? The coverage seems fair and open-ended

Fowler's statement describes ongoing and systematic patterns of discrimination, retribution and harassment against and of women and its facilitation by the human resource department. The headline leads with Uber's damage control message and ignores the most serious part of Fowler's description.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#405

Post by Paul-ish »

hatsunearu wrote: post #308

I just find the whole leather jacket incident incredibly baffling. It's just a few hundred bucks. Is Uber that short of cash? It's ridiculous.

It is absurd. They don't think "We don't hire and retain enough women to get a bulk discount on their gear.", they think "Their fault for being a woman."

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#406

Post by xenadu02 »

aisofteng wrote: post #143
Gatsky wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say withholding judgement was crazy, see the first sentence in my comment. I just don't see your point - she wrote a blog post. On her own website. She didn't say she was writing about the moral philosophy of sexual harassment. She didn't set out to write a feminist manifesto. She just wrote down what happened to her. Issues about morality and stance conflation are being imposed by you, derived from your hyp…

>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.

Except everything we've ever heard out of Uber makes her story extremely believable.

If Uber weren't run by a bunch of assholes doing their damnedest to act like assholes at every opportunity then maybe we could all stop and be careful to wait for the results of the investigation. There was a six month period where their entire executive team kept causing self-inflicted wounds to the point that investors had to tell them to shut up and stop talking.

You get the benefit of the doubt initially, yes. Uber long ago tossed that benefit in a dumpster, lit the dumpster on fire, then nuked the whole town from orbit.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#407

Post by [deleted] »

jimmywanger wrote: post #135
enraged_camel wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the dictionary definition of sexual harassment is quite clear cut. If you make unwanted sexual advances towards someone, you're sexually harassing them. I don't know about you, but most people are quite capable of understanding when an interaction is a) sexual in context and meaning and b) unwanted.

> If you make unwanted sexual advances towards someone, you're sexually harassing them. That's untrue. It has to pass a bar of being "frequent and severe". ( https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/sexual_harassment.cfm ) With your "clear cut definition", simply asking somebody out on a date that you work with is sexual harassment if he/she doesn't want to go. Which is ridiculous on the face of it, because if you don't make…

[deleted]

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#408

Post by SeoxyS »

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…

NYTimes is a news organization with a mandate to report on verifiable fact, not rumor or opinion. You're complaining that it's reported as a he-said-she-said type of story… but for now, that's exactly what it is. The claims are quite plausible and convincing (and likely true), but at this point they still are merely unsubstantiated claims. If I were to imagine the right way to report such a story at this point, it would go like this (1) summarize the claims made, (2) include the response from the accused, and (3) emphasize that this is a developing story. That's pretty much what the NYT did. However, until a court or investigation corroborates the report, they shouldn't be reported as irrefutable fact.

That said I agree that the comparison to the Ellen Pao case has no place in this report. Pao's case was quite different and much less convincing. In my distanced armchair opinion, she deserved to lose that case.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#409

Post by intrasight »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #218
ChuckMcM wrote: post #17

I wonder how much impact this will have. If they will discipline and fire people and put processes in place to keep the problem fixed, or if they will make a lot of noise about investigation and saying how terrible they feel and not have anything change. Someone here once asked me how I differentiated between a corporation run by people and a corporation structured as an institution. In the latter there are processes…

If Uber reflexively solved problems through discipline and process, they wouldn't have wound up in this situation in the first place. Far more likely is something like the least powerful people they can get away with scapegoating end up thrown to the wolves. 1-2 non-HR managers for being weak enough to let the situation get out of hand, and a bunch of HR folks for not effectively covering.

That will only work if those thrown to the wolves get some serious hush-money, as in "I'll never have to work again" money. I assume those folk have some strong evidence that the protection of misogynist employees went further up the org chart.

Re: Uber Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims by Ex-Employee

#410

Post by eropple »

theWatcher37 wrote: post #283
DanBC wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (this behavior doesn't match the 6 companies I've worked at) Why do you think women would tell you about their experiences? I've read your comments on HN, and you'd be the last person I'd tell if it had happened to me.

What a hateful and oddly specific comment. "I've read your comments" Yeah, ok buddy

He's not wrong. 'hueving's comment history around here pushes an extreme-right-wing viewpoint that is cloaked in just enough civility to make the decent folks I know around here reconsider whether or not it's worth engaging with him. (Many don't, because it's exhausting to be alternative-facted to death.) I wouldn't expect a woman--or anyone--to tell me jack and/or shit if I was comfortable expressing worldviews that treat them the way 'hueving does. And it's not "hateful" to call out somebody whose hat is exactly that; 'DanBC (who is a fantastic poster around here) is not wrong to use the history of a poster to challenge his I-don't-see-it-so-it-doesn't-exist dismissals. As for "oddly specific," 'DanBC has been here longer than I have; you start recognizing names when the pattern of posts that make your gorge rise goes on as long as these have.

But then, I spent a minute browsing your latest work, too, so I am not particularly surprised that in your post you choose to, as with most modern conservatives, attempt to call citing a reactionary's record "hate" when it is that reactionary's behavior that exemplifies it.

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