With Her Blog Post About Toxic Bro-Culture at Uber, Susan Fowler Proved That One Person Can Make a Difference (recode.net)

Kara Swisher, writing for Recode: It was Lao Tzu who said that "the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." In the case of complete and utter change reeling through Uber right now -- culminating in the resignation of its once untouchable CEO Travis Kalanick -- it turns out that it began with one of the most epic blog posts to be written about what happens when a hot company becomes hostage to its increasingly dysfunctional and toxic behaviors. It was clear from the moment you read the 3,000-word post by former engineer Susan Fowler about her time at the car-hailing company that nothing was going to be the same. Titled simply, "Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber," the essay deftly and surgically laid out the map that the media and others would use to prove to its out-to-lunch board and waffling investors that Uber CEO Travis Kalanick had to go. In her account, Fowler was neither mean nor self-righteous, although in reading the story that she laid out about her horrible time there, it would have been completely fair for her to have taken that tone.

Comments

Re:Uber Gets High Kalanick

[AmiMoJo]

Permission for bad behaviour tends to flow down the chain of command, and at the very least he failed to do anything meaningful about it.

If you want to label it then this is an example of rape culture. Not that anyone was literally raped as far as we know (at least not in the office, uber's customers were not so lucky), that's not what it means. It describes the kind of place that Uber is, where getting your female subordinates to sleep with you is just a matter of asking them often enough because secretly when women say "no" they really want it.

It's like at the end of Temple of Doom where the female lead storms off, having told Jones in no uncertain terms that she is fed up with nearly being killed or fed monkey brains or worse, so he just uses his whip to grab her around the waist and reel her back in like a fish. Then she smiles and goes to kiss him, because she secretly wanted it all along and her mouth was just lying because that's what women do. Most of us probably chuckled at the time, but it's actually pretty fucked up when you think about it.