Susan Fowler’s Story Echoes With Every Woman Who Has Ever Been Harassed

“It happens with every girl.”

“You should ignore such behaviour.”

“Don’t give them (men) any chance to harass you.” 

“Be safe.” 


The above lines are a sneak peek into the lives of women, we are weaving for them and the coming generation. To constantly rely on others for their safety, security and dignity. We have been conditioned to live in the shadows of self-doubt and question ourselves at every step. 


Victim blaming is not a new phenomenon, neither is it peculiar to any particular culture. Susan Fowler has recounted her painful year in Uber, which related to us women at a very fundamental level. 


We are asked so often to “be safe” and no harm intended! But “be safe” is just another way of saying keep your head down and be invisible. Only then can you stay (not sure though) away from the prying eyes and uncomfortable touches. God forbid if it happens, make sure to blame yourself first and then the circumstances. Not the harasser. 


Why am I being so caustic? Well, Susan Fowler’s account of a torturous year at Uber, will serve some explanation. 


We have listed some excerpts from Susan Fowler’s blog post titled, Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber. 


“I joined Uber as a site reliability engineer (SRE) back in November 2015, and it was a great time to join as an engineer. They were still wrangling microservices out of their monolithic API, and things were just chaotic enough that there was exciting reliability work to be done. The SRE team was still pretty new when I joined, and I had the rare opportunity to choose whichever team was working on something that I wanted to be part of.

After the first couple of weeks of training, I chose to join the team that worked on my area of expertise, and this is where things started getting weird. 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. It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR.”

Funny how we still have to come across situations like these. What good is one’s education and financial status if you’re not able to keep it in your pants?! The gall to put the other person, in this case a woman, at a compromising position and enrage their modesty is simply put, ghastly.



“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. I remarked that this didn't seem like much of a choice, and that I wanted to stay on the team because I had significant expertise in the exact project that the team was struggling to complete (it was genuinely in the company's best interest to have me on that team), but they told me the same thing again and again. One HR rep even explicitly told me that it wouldn't be retaliation if I received a negative review later because I had been "given an option". I tried to escalate the situation but got nowhere with either HR or with my own management chain (who continued to insist that they had given him a stern-talking to and didn't want to ruin his career over his "first offense").


Is this even legal? Blatantly putting a victim of sexual harassment in the spotlight and saving their own asses. It is not a fair and square deal for women out there who have undergone through sexual harassment. Why ignore an offender’s first offense? What are we waiting for, the time when he becomes an established ‘rapist?’


“Over the next few months, I began to meet more women engineers in the company. As I got to know them, and heard their stories, I was surprised that some of them had stories similar to my own. Some of the women even had stories about reporting the exact same manager I had reported, and had reported inappropriate interactions with him long before I had even joined the company. It became obvious that both HR and management had been lying about this being "his first offense", and it certainly wasn't his last. Within a few months, he was reported once again for inappropriate behavior, and those who reported him were told it was still his "first offense". The situation was escalated as far up the chain as it could be escalated, and still nothing was done.” 



Let me settle this down once and for all, guarding a sexual offender is as much a crime as the act itself. A huge network of women cannot stand up against one tiny man, because he has got the backing of the organisation’s administration. 


“Performance review season came around, and I received a great review with no complaints whatsoever about my performance. I waited a couple of months, and then attempted to transfer again. When I attempted to transfer, I was told that my performance review and score had been changed after the official reviews had been calibrated, and so I was no longer eligible for transfer. When I asked management why my review had been changed after the fact (and why hadn't they let me know that they'd changed it?), they said that I didn't show any signs of an upward career trajectory. I pointed out that I was publishing a book with O'Reilly, speaking at major tech conferences, and doing all of the things that you're supposed to do to have an "upward career trajectory", but they said it didn't matter and I needed to prove myself as an engineer. I was stuck where I was.”


Explanations I feel are now an integral facet of a woman’s identity. Anything and women feel the need to explain themselves. Even when the fault is entirely of someone else’s.This is not a victim behaviour that I am putting up. I am tired of being the modern woman who has reign in herself, only to make sure that the male ego is not hurt and questioned in front of everyone.


“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%. Women were transferring out of the organization, and those who couldn't transfer were quitting or preparing to quit. There were two major reasons for this: there was the organizational chaos, and there was also the sexism within the organization. When I asked our director at an org all-hands about what was being done about the dwindling numbers of women in the org compared to the rest of the company, his reply was, in a nutshell, that the women of Uber just needed to step up and be better engineers.” 



Sexism is a major issue which we still have not been able to address. The solution is to not lap it up with some more sexist reactions. But, take a sincere initiative to fix the problem of sexism in our workplaces. There are scores of women who had to switch from their jobs because of reasons like sexism, harassment at their workplaces. This is indeed a sorry state of affairs.


“On my last day at Uber, I calculated the percentage of women who were still in the org. Out of over 150 engineers in the SRE teams, only 3% were women. When I look back at the time I spent at Uber, I'm overcome with thankfulness that I had the opportunity to work with some of the best engineers around. I'm proud of the work I did, I'm proud of the impact that I was able to make on the entire organization, and I'm proud that the work I did and wrote a book about has been adopted by other tech companies all over the world. And when I think about the things I've recounted in the paragraphs above, I feel a lot of sadness, but I can't help but laugh at how ridiculous everything was. Such a strange experience. Such a strange year.”

Is it true that we have become apathetic towards issues like sexism and sexual harassment at workplace? Have we developed a skin so thick that nothing gets under our skin. Is it so that nothing bothers us anymore?

Why was the HR letting go the man in question with just a “stern talking”? Why not straight away suspend him for disrespecting the institution and enraging a woman's modesty. What good would a stern-talking do? Can we call ourselves an ultra modern society. 


I would like to recall a small incident here before wrapping up the post. Once, while travelling in the general coach of the Delhi metro with my cousin, a very “normal” case of letching happened with me. Yes, I call it normal because we have been conditioned to take it with a pinch of salt and move forward. Not my cousin though, he was furious and kept staring back at that man till he realised someone was aware of his lecherous ways. After realising that, he averted his eyes and my brother got talking with me asking why did I not react. My answer, it happens on a daily basis and frankly speaking I simply ignore it now, much easier.

To this my cousin objected and said,  that is what will embolden these men. His exact words; “I know it seems like you’re on a war footing, but then so be it.”

I guess he is absolutely right after all, if this is a war, we have no choice but to win. Let us pledge to defeat sexism at workplaces.

Read Susan Fowler’s full blog post Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber, here.