I fully expected this thread to be a shitshow, but comments here are overwhelmingly supportive of Fowler, and except perhaps for the very bottom of the thread, I don't see much much "this is unbelievable" at all. I'm pleasantly surprised.
It is good to see the support here. I am unpleasantly surprised at the comments admonishing her for not lawyering up, though. She bothered to write publicly, which is more than anyone outside the situation could rightly ask. She wrote very well on painful, personal events and I think can be proud of how she handled it. It opens the door for others, and Uber management is going to have to deal with it one way or another this week.
I give stuff like that a pass. We're the "well, actually" capital of the Internet (or at least one of the "well, actually" major metros). I think we all just want to be able to participate in the discussion and are not very tactful about crowbarring our way into it.
I don't feel like I read a lot admonishment (which would take forms like "by not suing you're complicit in harm to other women" or "if your story was really credible it would involve a lawyer"). I do feel like I read a lot of "you know, you could also..." or "this is a good example of why...".
Personally, I'm certain she's lawyered up, and has all the screenshots she needs to defend against a defamation lawsuit. There's no way a smart person like her would write this without all her ducks in a row.
Those cases invoke skepticism because they twist otherwise innocuous situations and try to blow them up into witch hunts where people lose their livelihood. No one should lose their job because an accusatory party happened to overhear them making a stupid juvenile dongle joke.
Susan's case on the other hand has clear, well-defined accusations of people acting in what sounds like unprofessional and sexist behavior to anyone with common sense. People should get fired if they ask their subordinates for sex multiple times. No wonder it (rightly) gets a lot of support.
The whole Julie Ann Horvath incident was way more than hula-hooping. Although, I think your underselling how things like that can create a deeply uncomfortable work environment for women.
I don't consider the dongle situation to be a story of institutional sexism at all, but one of a positive feedback loop of poor judgment and/or overreaction, by many of the people involved.
I would caution you from believing that anything less than a serious of incidents this meticulously documented shouldn't be taken seriously (e.g. Horvath's report). Most people are firstly concerned with being good at their jobs, not identifying the thread of sexist or harassing behavior underlying a bunch of incidents separated in time. Often, only in retrospect can the trend be seen. And by that time, it's difficult to find all the hard evidence.
Institutional sexism is rarely someone deciding to treat another person poorly, because they are a woman. More often, it's someone making a judgment call in a complex situation that turns out (due to their biases or lack of empathy) to exclude or demean women. The pattern of such things is what creates an unwelcoming and taxing environment. How many mental cycles must it take to cope with all of that bullshit? Most people's performance would suffer, leading to the conclusion that women just can't hack it. It's pretty incredible that the author thrived professionally, in the meantime.
Note that an environment of baseline hostility toward women may or may not be garnished with openly sexist behavior, as it was in this case.
How many mental cycles does it take to deal with any amount of bullshit? Claims of specific "institutional oppression" rightly deserve skepticism. It's like a Rorschach test; squint hard enough and you can make anything look like oppression. We all deal with a lot of bullshit at work, and in most cases, it's best just to accept that people are complicated and messy, but mostly well-intentioned, rather than stressing out over the "potentially discriminatory" institutional patterns.
Hula-hoops? Oppression because men may ogle. No hula-hoops, only video games and ping-pong? Oppression because the management isn't sensitive to the feminine interest in softer recreational activities, like expression through movement and dance. Either of these are plausible complaints.
Open-plan office? Great, creativity-boosting boon for employees that ensures everyone will build strong working relationships, and shows the employer's interest in fostering an open, collaborative environment where there are literally no barriers, physical or metaphorical, between teammates.
Or, wait, is it open-plan offices: Degrading, dystopian wage slave farm that ensures one manager can see all 50 monitors in the room at once and pounce at the first moment that someone switches to a Facebook tab, and a disrespectful mockery of a professional's need to concentrate on their important and serious work which could literally stop the company's cashflow if a minor mistake gets made in the wrong spot?
The point here is not to trivialize or to necessarily equate sexual harassment with other types of uncomfortable working situations, but to demonstrate that when what you admit is a "complex judgment call" is presented, flaws can usually be found no matter what decision is made. Judgment calls become complex rather than simple because there are substantial tradeoffs involved in all available options.
That's a lot different than having timestamped messages and strong documentation backing up explicit and clearly inappropriate advances from your immediate superiors. There's a lot less gray area to defend there.
What scares me is that there is no evidence, only allegation. Yet people are jumping on the bandwagon, making sure to pillory anything they disagree with in connection to an alleged incident. Guess what? People lie. Until some proof is offered, you should treat the accuser with dignity but assume the story is false.
If Party A accuses Party B of misconduct and Party B claims that the accusation is false (explicitly or implicitly), then someone is lying. If you aim to be nobly impartial until compelling evidence is available, the logically appropriate response is not "assume the story is false" but "assume the truth of the story is unknown". There's no purely logical reason to treat one story or the other as the one that should be believed by default. (Mind you, you don't have to refuse to make any judgement at all before irrefutable evidence is available. I personally believe that there are better approaches.) In this case, I don't know whether Uber has given any sort of response (whether to affirm or deny any of this), but absence of a denial certainly can't be construed to make their case stronger.
I too often see a tendency for people to treat claims of wrongdoing more skeptically than counterclaims of innocence, especially where gender is involved. That makes me very, very uneasy.
Until you have proved something has happened, it must be assumed that it did not happen. There is no reason to assume something is true just because someone claims it happened. Especially when it is a claim that can severely damage reputations, livelihoods, and lives.
Treating someone as a liar, however tentatively, can also severely damage reputations, livelihoods, and lives. There is not a neutral option here. (Or at least, a neutral balance is very delicate and hard to find, and your approach is emphatically not.)
And I will point out that the course you advocate places those consequences on the party who, if truthful, has already suffered harm. That outcome is certainly not better than people assuming bad things, however tentatively, about the target of a false accusation would be.
There is also no reason to assume something is false just because someone claims it happened. It's irrational to assume ANYTHING about a claim, was the point. But okay, I'll start assuming everything is false. Starting with your comment.
Why would she expose herself to libel laws? Why would she risk her career? Is she not capable of describing her experience and be seen as a witness to her own treatment?
I have no problem with describing one's alleged experience. I take issue with treating it as the truth, despite providing no evidence. This is all unsubstantiated hearsay.
I guess some of it would be hearsay, as some of her story involves what other engineers were telling her, but yeah, this is firsthand testimony, no doubt with plenty of screenshots/emails/etc to document.
