What was the whistleblower’s path to coming forward?
In February 2017, Susan Fowler posted a blog entry, “Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber,” about the sexism she experienced as a site reliability engineer for the company — and how her complaints were consistently undermined and ignored by HR. She described how her manager made sexual advances over a company chat on her first day. When she sent screenshots of those messages to HR, they told her he was a “high performer” and it would not be fair to take disciplinary action against him as it was his first offense.
Fowler told The New York Times in 2019 that she had been initially nervous to tell her story, but she wanted to stand up for everyone who was mistreated in Uber’s “extremely demoralizing” work environment.
What were their motivations?
Fowler had previously experienced sexual harassment while enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, having befriended a fellow student who then threatened to commit suicide if she did not return his romantic affections. When she reported the issue to administration, she was blamed for upsetting him, and her master’s degree was rescinded on the grounds that she had “withheld information.”
In 2020, Fowler told The Guardian that she had considered suing the university, but ultimately decided to move on; however, this experience played a major role in her decision to blow the whistle on Uber. “It’s amazing to me how everything that happened in my life then was preparing me for this moment,” she said. “I learned all these big lessons so when the time came to blow the whistle on Uber, I was ready.”
What was the initial reaction to their story?
Fowler’s blog post went viral on Twitter, reaching about 22,000 shares in a matter of days and racking up 6 million reads within weeks. In a February 2020 essay for TIME, Fowler claimed reporters were approaching her “from day one”; her story appeared in headlines less than a week after she posted it.
The virality and media coverage of Fowler’s story spurred another wave of criticism against Uber, which was already caught up in multiple scandals related to stealing technology, mistreating drivers, and burning through capital. #DeleteUber began to trend for the second time that year (the original campaign occurred when Uber broke a taxi workers’ strike that was opposing Donald Trump’s travel ban).
Her story prompted several other women to come forward with similar stories of sexual harassment at Uber — some of them about the same manager Fowler had been told was a first offender. By the end of 2017, Fowler was profiled in The New York Times and named one of Vanity Fair’s top business and cultural leaders of the year.
How did those being exposed react?
Fowler revealed in a TIME essay that she received suspicious emails from people she believed to be private investigators for Uber, hoping to disparage and discredit her by digging up personal information. Reporters asked if she had been paid by Lyft to defame its competitor. Later, she discovered that her personal emails and messages were being accessed and read, and that she was being followed by someone she suspected was another Uber PI.
How did public opinion change?
Although Fowler described this period of her life as being terrifying and isolating, her accusations led to a three-month internal investigation by US Attorney General Eric Holder, who recommended tighter oversight of Uber’s board and executives as well as a complete overhaul of its HR practices.
Uber’s investors wrote a letter titled “Moving Uber Forward,” demanding that then-CEO Travis Kalanick step down. Along with Uber’s myriad other scandals, Fowler’s post is considered to have influenced the decision to oust Kalanick and two Silicon Valley technology investors known to behave inappropriately with women. According to the Times, Kalanick’s replacement, former Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, wanted “to prove that the start-up has evolved past Mr. Kalanick’s raucous, tech-bro culture.” Khosrowshahi remains Uber’s CEO today.
Fowler’s blog post had been published just months before the #MeToo movement took off, and by the end of 2017 she appeared on the cover of TIME alongside Ashley Judd, Adama Iwu, Taylor Swift, and Isabel Pascual as part of the group of “silence breakers” collectively named Person of the Year for reporting workplace sexual misconduct.
Where is the whistleblower now?
In 2018, Fowler joined The New York Times opinion section as a technology editor and also worked for a period as editor-in-chief of Increment. She is now a full-time writer, and published Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber in 2020.
