Uber’s toxic work environment unleashed by a former employee, Susan Fowler. She wrote a book after a sexual harassment allegations revealed

Susan Fowler, a former site reliability engineer, or SRE, at Uber, published her book on sexual harassment allegations at Uber. The book is called “Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber” and Fowler reveals the background for career and toxic work culture at Uber. By the way, all started after her blog post, and she never expected then-CEO Travis Kalanick would start an investigation and quit his post.  

Uber: A disruptor but also a rule breaker

I didn’t the read book yet but read some interviews with Fowler. So, here’s what I learned: the cultural problems start at the top management of Uber and Travis Kalanick-Thuan Pham duo did nothing to change the culture. It was a battle for status and the duo liked to watching this. “Sexual harassment is often the tip of the iceberg for other kinds of labor violations and misconduct” said Susan Fowler. (Thuan Pam is the CTO of Uber)  And, Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped, a book about Uber, details the ways that rulebreaking and lawbreaking were the norm at the startup under Kalanick. Here are more about the toxic work environment at Uber: People at the company believe they are the disruptors and innovators at the taxi business and transit rules. They are the rulebreakers. But as it applied to the behaviours of the people, here’s what happened: “…And there were so many times when I would be in meetings and I would be yelled at, I was berated. It was a very aggressive, very abusive experience. And I think that many of the other employees, at least the ones that I worked with and was very close with, they seemed to be having very similar experiences. And it wasn’t just sexual harassment. There were many other issues that were going on there as well…”

The reasons why Fowler wrote the book

In the interview with NPR, Susan Fowler unveils her reasons to write to the book: first, she wanted to indicate that similar people should do the same, revealing their own stories. “…I tried to include as much of my own thinking and how I made these decisions and the things I wish I had done and the things that I was glad that I did so that readers who might be experiencing similar things can look at this and it will help them, you know, think about how they’re going to make their own decisions. This book is for them…”, added Fowler. Second of all, Fowler wanted to share her whole story to overcome the limitations of a blog post: “…You know, the blog post was around 3,000 words. It was a snapshot of a series of events at a particular moment in time about a company. But it didn’t really tell my whole story… And so I want to give context, you know, to my whole life…”

After reading the book, I will be posting more of my views. So far that seems Fowler reveals the background for a toxic workplace where she worked and we already saw changes at Uber, ending up with the  departure of CEO and Founder Travis Kalanick. On the other hand, Emily Chang wrote “Brotopia”,  a book investigates sexism and gender inequality in Silicon Valley. I heard that the book is published in Turkish. Let me add: i’m the first Turkish journalist writing on those allegations. (The link is in Turkish)