In the past, Uber explained away all kinds of transgressions. Its publicists are experts at managing the perception of mounting public backlash. And for a long time, Uber had the only two things that seem to matter in Silicon Valley: a product people kept using and an obscene amount of money.
Now, Uber’s future suddenly seems questionable.
One day before the dashcam video came out, Uber’s senior vice president of engineering resigned after having failed to tell Uber that he’d left his previous job at Google over a sexual-harassment complaint against him, according to Recode. Less than a week before that, Uber’s head of self-driving cars was accused in a federal lawsuit of having stolen a trove of secret documents from Google. That news came only days after an explosive blog post, written by the former Uber engineer Susan Fowler, describing a culture of pervasive and systematic sexism at the company.
“When I joined Uber, the organization I was part of was over 25 percent women. By the time I was trying to transfer ... this number had dropped down to less than 6 percent,” Fowler wrote. The clear reasons for this, she said, were “organizational chaos” and sexism. In one particularly memorable example, Fowler details an episode in which Uber’s female employees were told they couldn’t get the leather jackets that were being ordered for male staffers.
The director replied back, saying that if we women really wanted equality, then we should realize we were getting equality by not getting the leather jackets. He said that because there were so many men in the org, they had gotten a significant discount on the men’s jackets but not on the women’s jackets, and it wouldn't be equal or fair, he argued, to give the women leather jackets that cost a little more than the men’s jackets.
Uber even botched its response to the outrage over Fowler’s blog post, sending to some users who’d asked for more information a message that seemed to blame Fowler: “Everyone at Uber is deeply hurting after reading Susan Fowler’s blog post,” it said. Uber also felt compelled to come out and say explicitly that it’s not behind a smear campaign against Fowler, which she says started in the wake of her blog post about Uber, perhaps because Uber’s senior vice president of business once suggested spending $1 million on an opposition to dig up dirt on its critics personal lives. Uber declined to speak with me on the record for this story, and turned down requests for interviews with the company’s global head of diversity and its chief human resources officer.
The Fowler blog post dropped just weeks after a noisy anti-Uber campaign, which spread across the internet as #DeleteUber, launched by people who were incensed that Uber was giving rides to John F. Kennedy Airport, in New York City, during a strike by the union representing New York City taxi drivers. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance had halted service to and from the airport to show solidarity with people protesting President Donald Trump’s immigration ban.