BOOK REVIEW
Battling the Bro Culture at UBER Fowler, Susan. “Whistleblower: My Jouney to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber.” (NY: Penguin Random House, 2020). Reviewed by Jessica Devous
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n Susan Fowler’s autobiography Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber, she sheds light on the dysfunctional company culture at one of the fastest growing start-ups in Silicon Valley. She experienced sexual harassment and verbal abuse, retaliatory actions by colleagues, and gender-based discrimination at many companies in Silicon Valley. Speaking out against the vulgar and aggressive company culture at each software engineering job she had prior to working at Uber, she built her confidence to speak out about harassment based on gender, sexual preferences, and socioeconomic status. Supporting a community of women and minority workers in the tech industry, she advocated for justice at every stage, and persevered to tell her story publicly.
engineer, she was soon exposed to the discriminatory and sexist work environment from managers and coworkers. Overworked and underpaid, she decided to interview with Uber— her third company within a few years of graduating college. But her experience with sexist environments in the past stirred hesitance with Uber, even after she thoroughly researched the company for any cases of sexual harassment and discrimination. Finding no public stories that would hinder her acceptance for the job at Uber, Fowler accepted a position as a site reliability engineer. On her first day of work, her manager made sexual advances on her through the company’s chat. Uber quickly became just like all the other firms in Silicon Valley. Having learned at Penn to document every email, chat message, and comment made to her, she was in constant contact with HR, but her remarks were ignored as she was passed between different HR representatives. HR warned her that the manager who made sexual advances could retaliate by giving her negative performance reviews if she were to make a report against him, or she could avoid retaliatory actions by switching teams. Without much choice, she switched teams, but the harassment and discrimination as a female engineer followed her with every new project. Faced with almost daily occurrences of sexual advances and verbal abuse, her workplace anxiety heightened.
As a self-educated woman passionate about learning, she pursued a degree in STEM while continuing learning about philosophy, music, physics, and architecture in her free time. Fowler’s autobiography on the severe mistreatment of her and other women in Silicon Valley is well-documented. She composed a compilation of multiple sexual harassment incidents that occurred since her undergrad years at the University of Pennsylvania. Her story is not only for the public to become aware of the misconduct woman have witnessed, but also as an inspiration for those who continue to suffer from it. The sexual harassment she experienced, and her higher-up’s refusal to conduct investigations from each report is relevant to popular concern about the percentage of women who are silenced in similar incidents and do not receive justice.
But Fowler persisted and tried to form solidarity with other workers who experienced the same misconduct. She met other woman engineers with similar stories of sexual harassment at Uber. Like Fowler, women who experienced sexual harassment and wanted to file formal reports were also dismissed by HR, and no repercussions were taken against their abusers. Through every effort to report the abuse, they were disregarded by HR and a proper investigation was never issued, nor did the perpetrators ever receive punishment other than a stern warning. Due to these alleged claims, Fowler and her female and minority coworkers were never valued at Uber. Fowler, for example, was a top software engineer who mastered every technical challenge and published a textbook on software architecture as a model for other tech companies to utilize during her time at Uber. But the company never allowed her to live up to her potential. After multiple transfers in her department, retaliatory negative performance reviews by her male managers, and the company’s lack of action against her complaints, Fowler did not feel valued at Uber. After working with them for a year, she left Uber and moved on to become a founding editor for a financial services and software company, Stripe.
Growing up in poverty and having to home-school herself through primary and secondary school, Fowler had dreams larger than most of becoming a writer, architect, professional violinist, and student of philosophy, music, physics, and more. Her perseverance and passion for learning was already evident when, as a young teen, she was accepted into Arizona State University, and later into the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn, she pursued a bachelor’s in physics and philosophy, and master’s in philosophy. Working through her classes and research assistant positions, she faced her first incident in harassment and retaliation at Penn when she was held responsible for one of her peer’s mental health disorders. After she made many formal complaints to the university for failure to assist her in the Title IX process, she was stripped of her dual-degree program by the Dean of Students. Despite not receiving the education she long dreamed of, Fowler’s experience with coding landed her a job with tech startups Plaid and PubNub in Silicon Valley. However, as a female software
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Despite leaving Uber, her suffering lingered and she faced an internal battle whether to be the woman to blow the whistle on the sexist, discriminatory, and hostile company culture, knowing she could face consequences and company threats and retaliation. She had been down this road too many times before, and it was finally time for someone to hear her story. She published an essay on her personal blog about every discriminatory incident connected to Uber, from the bias against women engineers and lower wages, to sexual advances and verbal abuse by company managers. Within six hours of publishing her story, her blog went viral and millions of people read it. Different media outlets immediately reached out to Fowler and her family members and friends, old college peers, and past coworkers to retrieve more information on the blog and her background. The New York Times even picked up her story and created an expose against Uber’s entire company culture, referencing to past incidents of assault, theft, and an infamous fraternity-like party Uber had with all employees in Vegas. With the negative media buzz, Uber launched an official investigation into the allegations. During the investigation, the rumors lingered for months about Fowler and she faced non-stop harassment from media personnel, was threatened online, and even stalked by private investigators hired by Uber.
journey of understanding how the real world unfolds, and it gets ugly. Through this emotional account of Fowler’s past to present experiences, she is highly persuasive in having the reader believe the trauma she withstood. Her evidence was very clear and indisputable, like the chat messages her colleague sent her and the altered reports from her department manager so his team could seem diverse with women engineers. Fowler held a ton of evidence against the other parties; keeping record of every email and message received. It was not until Fowler was in college that she realized higher powers in an organizational structure can halt her adamant determination and prevent her from succeeding. She refers to the organizational structure of Uber, where she would be sent through loops with different HR representatives, managers, and higher ups, and even the CEO and CFO, all who ignored her sexual harassment reports. It was not until she shattered the system by exposing Uber publicly that she found justice. Due to the structure she mentions and the power imbalance between HR and the workers, the Political Economy viewpoint is best characterized in her autobiography. The threats against her at Penn was the first incident Fowler experienced where she faced retaliation by the power structure of the school and the Dean of Students was in opposition of her academic goals.
From her childhood in Arizona to young adult career in Silicon Valley, Susan Fowler persevered through every incident of verbal and sexual abuse based on her gender, sexual identity, socioeconomic status, and education background. With each harassment allegation against her peers in college and her colleagues at each firm, she was always silenced by a higher power, whether that be the Dean of Students at Penn, or the CFO at Uber. The difficulties she endured trying to obtain justice against her abusers consumed her life both in and out of the work environment. It was not until she went public with her story and explicitly wrote her truth and unleashed the trauma, she so long endured; justice was finally served.
In addition to this, male coworkers continued to undermine her potential as a software engineer because she was a woman. Even though she continued to prove them wrong through every technical task thrown her way, like being given a different exam to test her coding abilities at Uber. That did not prevent the men in the office from making casual sexual remarks and belittling her performance. Though she received an education from an Ivy League college and had an abundant amount of research experience to support her resume, the male-oriented institutional organization embedded within each firm in Silicon Valley made it nearly impossible for Fowler and her fellow female co-workers to receive fair and equal treatment. The “boy’s club” status at each firm, where competitiveness and aggression arose in the work environment, the structure was designed against women and any other minority that did not encompass that attitude.
After the thorough investigation by Uber, lawyers confirmed all her claims against the company. The many allegations against the misogynist company culture was finally validated, and in the report, Uber was recommended to rebuild the company’s organizational structure, beginning with programs to monitor all employee harassment and discrimination claims. The shaming of Uber pressured the CEO at the time, Travis Kalanick, to step down, which he did a week after the report’s release. While Fowler did not receive a direct settlement from Uber, she did support a $10 million settlement filed in federal court for pay equity and harassment allegations for 487 women and minority Uber employees.
Through a Political Economy viewpoint, it almost seems like Fowler would be defeated in her position at Uber. The emotional trauma she experienced daily is enough for any women to have wished to remain invisible in the workplace. It was the inspiration that another woman’s story was kept in secret; another sexual harassment case was hidden by HR; another aspiring female engineer was dreaming of making it in Silicon Valley that propelled Fowler to break free from the feedback effect in the tech industry. It is disheartening to know she could not remain in the toxic industry within Silicon Valley, yet she gained the courage to speak out when all odds were against her. Her story during the rise of the #MeToo movement, and a time of political turmoil shook the political economy landscape surrounding gender-based discrimination.
Whistleblower is a compelling autobiography where Fowler shares a very private and personable part of her past. Through the emotion described in each abusive incident, the reader cannot help but to empathize with the prolonged history of sexual harassment and discrimination she had to endure, beginning at a young age. By beginning with her past leading up to her time at Uber, where the main storyline begins to develop, the reader feels as if they have known Fowler form a young age. We grow with Fowler on her own 27
