A recent blog post by a former Uber employee is making big waves in Silicon Valley, describing an experience of prolonged and systemic sexual harassment.Susan Fowler's LinkedIn page says she worked as a site reliability engineer at Uber from November 2015 to December 2016, and that she left the ride-hailing giant last month for a job at the digital commerce startup Stripe.The reason she ditched Uber, she wrote in a blog post entitled "Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber," was because of her "strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying experience."Within the first few weeks of her time at Uber, Fowler claimed she was propositioned for sex by her manager, who she then reported to HR. In turn, upper management and HR told her "that they wouldn't feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to" because it was the employee's first offense.According to Fowler, HR and management were generally insensitive to, if not completely dismissive of, her claims and those of other women at Uber. At different points they apparently revised her performance reviews surreptitiously, allegedly suggested to Fowler that she was the cause of her sexual harassment issues, and threatened to fire her for reporting a manager to HR (a move which Fowler says her CTO later acknowledged was illegal).Though Fowler wrote that she was "lucky enough during all of this to work with some of the most amazing engineers in the Bay Area," she claimed that by the time she left the Site Reliability Engineering team in January, only 3% of the 150 engineers in the unit were women.Since Fowler's blog post was published on Sunday, it has been shared widely across social media, and has provoked a significant response from Uber.Read the full story on VICE News.
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