Uber should be innocent until proven guilty
Silicon Valley was abuzz at the weekend following a post from former Uber Inc. employee Susan Fowler who alleges she faced sexual harassment at the hands of another employee and that her complaints and those of others were ignored by the company’s human resources department.
This being Uber, a company people love to hate given any excuse, a lynch mob has risen once calling for blood, or more specifically, in this case, a new call to #boycottUber.
In the age of social media, companies are guilty to proven innocent but have Uber been fairly proven guilty of anything at this stage?
Let me just say from the outset that I honestly don’t know whether Fowler is telling the truth and she may well be but as the case stands the evidence is flimsy and relies on the word of one person who provides no evidence.
Here’s what’s concerning with with the case as it stands against Uber. Naturally, this is at the time of writing (6am US EST Monday Feb. 20), if other victims come forward or Fowler presents more evidence the following will change (it’s based on her initial blog post only).
No name
On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat.
At no point does Fowler name the manager who she alleges sexually harassed her despite the fact that she claims to have taken records of their interactions and forwarded them to Uber HR.
The question is why? Is Fowler concerned about a defamation claim? If she is convinced that he is guilty and has evidence to support this, why not name him?
No evidence presented
All throughout Fowler’s post, she refers to making multiple complaints to Uber’s human resources team, including taking screenshots, but she neither:
- presents dates
- presents any copies of screenshots
- presents any copies of correspondence
…and yet without providing these hard facts she is still able to string together a concise narrative of her issues with sexual harassment and her interactions with Uber’s HR Department over a period of 1 year, suggesting that she either has remarkable memory; some or all of what is alleged she has evidence for; or alternatively much of the story as ad-libbed and perhaps at times exaggerated.
The question arises: if she has evidence backing her claims why hasn’t she provided more details? If some of those documents cannot be released because they are bound by an Uber non-disclosure agreement why doesn’t she say so?
Bringing in others
Fowler alleges that others had similar complaints against the accused but were brushed off by Uber HR as well despite the fact by her own admission that the accused eventually left the company, or by her own words:
I don’t know what he did that finally convinced them to fire him.
Questions: why not name the others or note (and to be fair some people are not comfortable coming forward publicly) that others did not want to go public with this? If the accused was fired is this not evidence that Uber HR did act, be it perhaps not as quickly as Fowler wanted? (note again the story lacks dates and a coherent timeline).
Management/ performance issues
The most interesting thing about Fowler’s long blog post is that putting aside the alleged sexual harassment (which may or may not be true) she had other issues in the company including the ability to transfer and negative performance reviews (that’s the tl;dr version, read her post for more).
She alleges, again without evidence, that her other issues in the company, despite the alleged sexual harasser being fired from the company, stem from her initial complaint, but worse still provides a running commentary on what she saw as wrong with internal management and interdepartmental politics.
Question: did she actually have performance issues at Uber and is the sexual harassment complaint being used by her as an excuse for her other issues?
It’s a fair question that should be asked because anyone reading the blog post has to ask it because Fowler moves on from one complaint to another all of which have no provable link back towards her initial sexual harassment complaint (again, remembering Uber did actually fire the accused) and seem to be more ofher not fitting well and/ or working well with the organization instead.
Indeed in the case where she claims that it was pointed out to her that given the volume of her ongoing emails and complaints to HR about all and sundry (the sexual harassment complaint being valid, some of the other complaints being dubious at best) that if HR did actually ask her (again no evidence provided) if she had ever asked her whether she had considered that the problem might be her is actually a valid point.
Having worked in various management and company founder positions some employees are never happy, and it’s usually the poorly performing employees that complain the most particularly when they are asked to address their behavior or as in Fowler’s case didn’t meet performance reviews.
Let’s be honest: no one likes being told they’re not delivering and without evidence to the contrary that’s essentially what happened to Fowler.
It should be noted that she claims she was not entitled to poor performance reviews because she had written a book. Given the standards of books these days, her use of that as a defense is telling, to say the least.
Give Uber a chance
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has said he was not aware of the allegations before reading Fowler’s blog post and that he has ordered an urgent investigation into these allegations which is exactly the right response.
That investigation may turn up systematic wrongdoing…or it may not, but either way a commitment from the high-profile CEO to investigate a high-profile case is one that should be taken seriously.
In the mean time, the #boycottUber tag continues to trend as the lynch mob bays for blood with no substantive evidence.
An opinion piece on the negative mores of social media I’ll leave for another day, but for fuck sake people: give Uber a chance to investigate the matter and to see if there’s more to it, because at this point of time the accuser has provided nothing more than her word, with no evidence, to back her claims.
