5 ms·

Were you there when the alleged facts happened? If not, it is definitely he-said-she-said. It is probable that things happened as Fowler claims, but we have no

by Joeri 10y ago

Were you there when the alleged facts happened? If not, it is definitely he-said-she-said. It is probable that things happened as Fowler claims, but we have no way of knowing without evidence. The article mentions the facts, which are basically who said what, since neither side has shared any evidence. Personally I'm not going to pass judgment either way without knowing more, but this is definitely going into my something-fishy-over-there file.

mcguire 10y ago
http://bit.ly/2kCE416 http://bit.ly/2kCE416 She claims to have a record of all of the events, although she (rightly) didn't post them.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  It might not stay that way like this.
logicallee 10y ago
Maybe the reporter didn't read the blog post, because it was beyond his attention span. Honestly, it just sounds like an editor assigned him to report. If he had read it he wouldn't have summarized it as "a lengthy post on her personal blog": he would have written that Fowler wrote about her experiences which began " 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." After she rightfully brought this to the attention of HR, she was told "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." with no further penalties or reprimand. That latter part is what's shocking, that she was told her performance would be reviewed poorly, even though she was very qualified (this team was the best fit for her and the work she wanted to do.) She also wrote that HR told her regarding such complaints that they were first-time offenses, though she heard the same experience from multiple women. In her account she didn't talk about harassment much (except the one incident) and instead said that she was given poor reviews (changed after she saw that the performance reviews were good) in order to keep from transferring. A lot of the blog post was about the lack of responsiveness by HR. Her biggest issue was the way in which women were driven out. The important quote is "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%" and then at the end that "Out of over 150 engineers in the SRE teams, only 3% were women." Instead of reading her blog post and reporting on it, the reporter simply reported without reading, in a cookie-cutter way. (Or it certainly reads that way.) Having read the source yesterday (along with everyone else here), I don't like the reporter's summary at all.
- danaliv 10y ago
  > Maybe the reporter didn't read the blog post, because it was beyond his attention span. I know Mike and I assure you that (1) he has the attention span to read a blog post, and (2) he was not just "assigned." He's on the tech beat. He lives in San Francisco, not New York. And he's paying very close attention to this story. Go look at his Twitter feed if you don't believe me. https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac
  - brudgers 10y ago
    Curious if the reporter uses or has used Uber. If so, it is the sort of thing that traditional journalism standards would probably applaud disclosing as a potential conflict of interest. To me, this is particularly relevant for a reporter on the Silicon Valley tech beat who is likely to have past interactions with companies like Uber...given the reality that working the Silicon Valley tech beat for the New York Times, for whatever it entails, does not seem to entail breaking stories like Fowler's. Basic Googling suggests there's plenty of basis for investigative journalism: http://fortune.com/2016/09/15/apple-employees-sexist-environment/ http://fortune.com/2016/09/15/apple-employees-sexist-environ... http://fortune.com/2015/09/16/microsoft-gender-discrimination-suit/ http://fortune.com/2015/09/16/microsoft-gender-discriminatio... http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/01/18/oracle-lawsuit-labor-department-discrimination/96723084/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/01/18/oracle-la... http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/18/technology/facebook-discrimination-suit/ http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/18/technology/facebook-discrimi... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/12/silicon-valley-women-harassment-gender-discrimination https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/12/silicon-v... What is curious is that there are not New York Times stories in the high ranking Google search results for relevant search terms.
    - ssalazar 10y ago
      LOL. "Having used the fungible services of a company that is being reported on" is a weak basis for claiming a conflict of interest, a mere grasping of straws. These disclaimers are reserved for financial or business interests between an author and their subject; saving $5 on cab fare over the weekend doesn't count.
brudgers 10y ago
Fowler described a pattern of ongoing behaviors by management and HR. That description forms the bulk of Fowler's narrative. The New York Times portrays Fowler's entire narrative via a single isolated incident. Conversely, it portrays tweets by the CEO and a board member as substantive and expansive responses of equal detail and devotes more column inches to corporate damage control PR than to Fowler's statement. There is no plausibility analysis of the CEO's claim of unawareness given the recent replacement of the head of HR and its upgrade to a C-level position. Instead the New York Times analysis consists of drawing false parallels to the ambiguities of Pao's unrelated experiences.
tlogan 10y ago
I just came here to say that. I do not trust Uber and I do not trust her. And without evidence it is "he-said-she-said". I really do not know what to say here. Personally, I'm also worried that girlfriend of my wife working in Uber HR might be accused of "hiding sexual harassment" and subsequently just fired (because they are liability). In these cases kind of cases, "investigation by CEO" will cause low-level employees to be fired - even if they did nothing wrong. Just to satisfy blood thirsty "internet lynch crowd".
- geofft 10y ago
  > Personally, I'm also worried that girlfriend of my wife working in Uber HR might be accused of "hiding sexual harassment" and subsequently just fired (because they are liability). In these cases kind of cases, "investigation by CEO" will cause low-level employees to be fired - even if they did nothing wrong. That's a reasonable thing to worry about, but regardless of whether the accusation is true, the worry is about an incompetent and cowed CEO not doing his job, not about an ex-employee making an accusation without public proof. If she's right, and an investigation by the CEO causes low-level employees to be fired and no real change of the company culture and the people responsible for it, those people were working for a bad CEO all along. If she's right, the behavior of people out-politicking their direct managers and throwing away useful projects is a ticking time bomb, and if she didn't say anything, someone would have, soon enough. Or some project would have failed and people would have asked questions, or a "high performer" would have not gotten their political way, or something. And the CEO would fire low-level employees for all the same reasons. If she's somehow wrong, and the CEO gives into unsubstantiated public pressure and makes scapegoats out of good workers, again, I don't see how this will be the only time. Uber is, shall we say, not a company that is consistently the recipient of positive press. Something else will go wrong (say, marketing threatening to blackmail a journalist) and the CEO will again feel obligated to scapegoat someone. A good CEO should stand up for their employees. You're worried about the CEO either way. You already were - you said you don't trust Uber. You need to help your wife's girlfriend find a better job where she's not at risk of being fired by an incompetent CEO.
  - tlogan 10y ago

by Joeri 10y ago

mcguire 10y ago

http://bit.ly/2kCE416 http://bit.ly/2kCE416 She claims to have a record of all of the events, although she (rightly) didn't post them.

jacquesm 10y ago
It might not stay that way like this.

logicallee 10y ago

Maybe the reporter didn't read the blog post, because it was beyond his attention span. Honestly, it just sounds like an editor assigned him to report. If he had read it he wouldn't have summarized it as "a lengthy post on her personal blog": he would have written that Fowler wrote about her experiences which began " 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." After she rightfully brought this to the attention of HR, she was told "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." with no further penalties or reprimand. That latter part is what's shocking, that she was told her performance would be reviewed poorly, even though she was very qualified (this team was the best fit for her and the work she wanted to do.) She also wrote that HR told her regarding such complaints that they were first-time offenses, though she heard the same experience from multiple women. In her account she didn't talk about harassment much (except the one incident) and instead said that she was given poor reviews (changed after she saw that the performance reviews were good) in order to keep from transferring. A lot of the blog post was about the lack of responsiveness by HR. Her biggest issue was the way in which women were driven out. The important quote is "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%" and then at the end that "Out of over 150 engineers in the SRE teams, only 3% were women." Instead of reading her blog post and reporting on it, the reporter simply reported without reading, in a cookie-cutter way. (Or it certainly reads that way.) Having read the source yesterday (along with everyone else here), I don't like the reporter's summary at all.

danaliv 10y ago
> Maybe the reporter didn't read the blog post, because it was beyond his attention span. I know Mike and I assure you that (1) he has the attention span to read a blog post, and (2) he was not just "assigned." He's on the tech beat. He lives in San Francisco, not New York. And he's paying very close attention to this story. Go look at his Twitter feed if you don't believe me. https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac
- brudgers 10y ago
  Curious if the reporter uses or has used Uber. If so, it is the sort of thing that traditional journalism standards would probably applaud disclosing as a potential conflict of interest. To me, this is particularly relevant for a reporter on the Silicon Valley tech beat who is likely to have past interactions with companies like Uber...given the reality that working the Silicon Valley tech beat for the New York Times, for whatever it entails, does not seem to entail breaking stories like Fowler's. Basic Googling suggests there's plenty of basis for investigative journalism: http://fortune.com/2016/09/15/apple-employees-sexist-environment/ http://fortune.com/2016/09/15/apple-employees-sexist-environ... http://fortune.com/2015/09/16/microsoft-gender-discrimination-suit/ http://fortune.com/2015/09/16/microsoft-gender-discriminatio... http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/01/18/oracle-lawsuit-labor-department-discrimination/96723084/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/01/18/oracle-la... http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/18/technology/facebook-discrimination-suit/ http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/18/technology/facebook-discrimi... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/12/silicon-valley-women-harassment-gender-discrimination https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/12/silicon-v... What is curious is that there are not New York Times stories in the high ranking Google search results for relevant search terms.
  - ssalazar 10y ago
    LOL. "Having used the fungible services of a company that is being reported on" is a weak basis for claiming a conflict of interest, a mere grasping of straws. These disclaimers are reserved for financial or business interests between an author and their subject; saving $5 on cab fare over the weekend doesn't count.

brudgers 10y ago

Fowler described a pattern of ongoing behaviors by management and HR. That description forms the bulk of Fowler's narrative. The New York Times portrays Fowler's entire narrative via a single isolated incident. Conversely, it portrays tweets by the CEO and a board member as substantive and expansive responses of equal detail and devotes more column inches to corporate damage control PR than to Fowler's statement. There is no plausibility analysis of the CEO's claim of unawareness given the recent replacement of the head of HR and its upgrade to a C-level position. Instead the New York Times analysis consists of drawing false parallels to the ambiguities of Pao's unrelated experiences.

tlogan 10y ago

I just came here to say that. I do not trust Uber and I do not trust her. And without evidence it is "he-said-she-said". I really do not know what to say here. Personally, I'm also worried that girlfriend of my wife working in Uber HR might be accused of "hiding sexual harassment" and subsequently just fired (because they are liability). In these cases kind of cases, "investigation by CEO" will cause low-level employees to be fired - even if they did nothing wrong. Just to satisfy blood thirsty "internet lynch crowd".

geofft 10y ago
> Personally, I'm also worried that girlfriend of my wife working in Uber HR might be accused of "hiding sexual harassment" and subsequently just fired (because they are liability). In these cases kind of cases, "investigation by CEO" will cause low-level employees to be fired - even if they did nothing wrong. That's a reasonable thing to worry about, but regardless of whether the accusation is true, the worry is about an incompetent and cowed CEO not doing his job, not about an ex-employee making an accusation without public proof. If she's right, and an investigation by the CEO causes low-level employees to be fired and no real change of the company culture and the people responsible for it, those people were working for a bad CEO all along. If she's right, the behavior of people out-politicking their direct managers and throwing away useful projects is a ticking time bomb, and if she didn't say anything, someone would have, soon enough. Or some project would have failed and people would have asked questions, or a "high performer" would have not gotten their political way, or something. And the CEO would fire low-level employees for all the same reasons. If she's somehow wrong, and the CEO gives into unsubstantiated public pressure and makes scapegoats out of good workers, again, I don't see how this will be the only time. Uber is, shall we say, not a company that is consistently the recipient of positive press. Something else will go wrong (say, marketing threatening to blackmail a journalist) and the CEO will again feel obligated to scapegoat someone. A good CEO should stand up for their employees. You're worried about the CEO either way. You already were - you said you don't trust Uber. You need to help your wife's girlfriend find a better job where she's not at risk of being fired by an incompetent CEO.
- tlogan 10y ago