If you haven’t read Susan Fowler Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber yet, do have a read about the kind of people that run Uber. Here’s how her piece starts:
After the first couple of weeks of training, I chose to join the team that worked on my area of expertise, and this is where things started getting weird. On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn’t. He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn’t help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with. It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR.
And it only gets more ridiculous from there. Now, Uber is not the only tech company that mishandles sexual harassment claims; maybe Silicon Valley companies in general are disrupting stagnant office environments in favor of free market sexual harassment policies. After all, according to the 2015Elephant in the Valley survey of senior women in technology, 60% reported unwanted sexual advances; of those, nearly two-thirds had received advances from a superior. Half of those advances from a superior happened more than once.
These problems have solutions. One tech CEO, Debbie Madden, writes Many in Tech Have Gotten Harassment Against Women in the Workplace Right for Decades:
Here’s an idea: adopt a zero tolerance policy for harassment. Do this today, and hold people accountable for their actions. For all of the Uber employees who have done wrong — fire them immediately. Yes, Uber must investigate and confirm each allegation. But that doesn’t take years, it takes days. Once confirmed, fire immediately.
Firing employees who sexually harass other employees? How disruptive! There’s more to it than just firing the lousiest male employees, though: Rachel Thomas wrote last fall about The Real Reason Women Quit Tech (and How to Address It). She includes lots of great ideas and links to studies and articles, but this bit about internalized gender bias might be my favorite:
Researchers at Deutsche Bank hypothesized that women managing directors were leaving the firm to work for competitors because they were seeking greater work/life balance. However, they discovered instead that women were leaving because they were being offered higher ranking jobs by competitors that they weren’t being considered for internally.
It must be tough to run a business when you only promote half of your qualified employees.