Susan Fowler is a hero; it must have taken a tremendous amount of courage to hit the 'send' button while knowing her life was going to change. My niece is about to graduate into the SDE work force and I have little doubt that the culture is incrementally better because of Fowler.

> the SDE work force

Google didn't help with this acronym.

Sorry, I'll be better with acronyms. Software development engineer.

presumably "software development engineer" (think mainly Amazon uses this)

maybe software development engineer?

Totally agree.

The only thing I'd add - I'm not sure of the exact timeline, or the exact causation chain - but I feel like Susan Fowler's article was one of the lead-ups to the MeToo movement. So in a sense, what she did wasn't just an important moment for our industry, but for all industries.

That's a great point -- the blog post was a turning point and should be hailed as such.

I remember reading that post and being surprised how little of it was actually sexism (the only thing I saw that qualified was the thing about the shirts), and how much of it was just maltreatment of programmers of all types. But I guess if you have to slap the label "sexism" on it to get it to be taken seriously, we take what we can get.

The sexism I see in her post: Upon joining, her manager sexually propositioned her; a subsequent manager sabotaged her performance reviews and attempts at transferring to keep a woman on his team; they gave leather jackets to SREs as a gift, but would only get jackets made for men (I think this is what you refer to as "the shirts"); she recalls many emails that she does not describe; HR claims she is the problem in all of her claims; she was threatened with firing over her claims of sexual harassment, and they backed off when she pointed out that was illegal.

Those are the instances. What that tells me is that it was a deeply sexist system.

See: https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...

Propositioning to her is not really sexism, but it's inappropriate and unprofessional.

It is certainly inappropriate and unprofessional. But it's also sexism, in that for centuries men here have been using power to push women to have sex without regard to their actual interest. E.g., marital rape didn't become a crime across the US until 1993: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape#United_States

That isn't sexism, similar things happens all the time in gay relationships. Similarly men murdering women in relationships is not sexism, since gay men murder their partners at a higher rate than straight men. So it isn't sexism, it isn't about men hating women, it is just about men committing a lot more brutal violence on average. Or in this case, it is just about men being a lot more forceful about sex than women, even when they are proposing to men.

The notion that the law allowed men to rape certain women seen as their property isn't sexism?

You could be right that men have some innate tendency to commit more violence. But what they also have, as your excuses here make plain, is more social license to commit violence. The former, if true, is just a fucked up fact our evolutionary history. The latter, though is very definitely sexism.

Propositioning a woman who you manage at work is sexual harassment and sexist.

Sexual harassment? Sure. Sexist? Sorry, no, that's just silly. By your logic, if a male manager only propositions female subordinates, it's sexist, because he isn't also propositioning male subordinates. That's not sexist, that's a side effect of the male manager being heterosexual.

By your logic, every person that only dates people of a particular sex is "sexist", which is completely ridiculous.

You're thinking that I label the behavior sexist because the manager propositions only women and not men. I am not. I am labeling the behavior sexist because it contributes to both a work culture, and the wider culture, which excludes women from status and power.

I don't know about this; it isn't completely unheard of for female managers to proposition male subordinates, it just doesn't happen as often obviously. I think it's wrong and abusive, no matter which sex does it (and to whom; (gay) men propositioning other men happens too), but I have a hard time seeing how this is "sexist" or only harmful to women, though obviously, due to inertia I think (more men being in positions of power), it negatively affects women more. I will grant you, however, that it can be argued that it contributes to keeping the gender-unequal status quo.

Honestly, it sounds like a sociopath was in charge of HR.

>Honestly, it sounds like a sociopath was in charge of HR.

The very topmost post in this thread you're posting in discusses how people should be educated that the whole function of HR is not to be a moral arbiter, but to protect the company's financial interests, which is 100% true IMO.

Therefore, it seems that nearly every company of any size has a sociopath running HR. How else can you explain people who would protect sexual predators in their companies and enable victims to be abused, all because it improves the company's bottom line?

This is the typical maltreatment you experience as a programmer?

> 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.

Or this?

> When I pointed out how few women were in SRE, she recounted with a story about how sometimes certain people of certain genders and ethnic backgrounds were better suited for some jobs than others, so I shouldn't be surprised by the gender ratios in engineering. Our meeting ended with her berating me about keeping email records of things, and told me it was unprofessional to report things via email to HR.

Regarding the propositioning for sex, a uni buddy of mine was propositioned during an interview for an internship by his male interviewer (buddy is gay, interviewer likely is too). It was absolutely vile, unsettling behavior, and it made me think it might be more common than I previously thought.

Later, one of my sisters told us about how she applied for some job at a startup (not an IT related job), and after the interview she was told she wouldn't get the job because of other strong applicants and her lack of experience in the field, which is fine and true. But then one of the interviewers asked her out for drinks right after that, at which point she couldn't lose the feeling that maybe she was refused the job only so that this interviewer could hit on her later (which he probably couldn't have if she got her job and he became a superior to her).

When - as a young(er) man - I did my mandatory civil services (which I had to do because I refused military service) in a hospital, there were not just one but few female nurses[1] who engaged in what I would consider inappropriate remarks ("I'd eat you up", "nice tushy, you should wear tighter pants", "if I was a few years younger I would...") and one nurse going so far as "jokingly" slapping me on the butt. There were a sizable amount of patients who also engaged in such remarks, as well as male patients non-nonchalantly asking me "how many of those nurses have you banged so far?".

I am still mad at myself that I didn't report at least the slapping up the chain, thinking at the time "I don't wanna be that guy getting angry over a joke" and "I don't want to be seen overreacting or considered to be a victim"; and I didn't even have the additional problem of having to care about my career as this job was something I didn't want to keep doing anyway as soon as my mandatory time ran out.

I talked to my dad about it, who happened to have done his own civil service in the exact same hospital in the late 1970s; his experiences were more or less the same, tho he said he didn't even consider reporting such behavior at all.

What I guess I am trying to say is that this kind of vile behavior is in fact pretty common, unfortunately, and also not necessarily only something men do to women (although I am sure it is more prevalent in that direction). But most of it I wouldn't attribute it to sexism, but to assholes being assholes.

[1] most of the people, especially the nurses, were nice or at least professional

> What I guess I am trying to say is that this kind of vile behavior is in fact pretty common, unfortunately, and also not necessarily only something men do to women (although I am sure it is more prevalent in that direction). But most of it I wouldn't attribute it to sexism, but to assholes being assholes.

So it's true that being propositioned for sex by someone who has authority over you is not something exclusively suffered by women. And the fact that it happens more often to women than men at Uber may not necessarily an issue of "malicious" sexism, since it just so happens that men in Uber management far outnumber the women.

What elevates Fowler's scenario is the systematic responses by HR and other management to ignore or otherwise suppress this issue, with Fowler and with many of the colleagues she talked to. After Fowler thoroughly documented this first incident, an ostensibly non-sexist HR/management would sanction the manager, not Fowler [0]:

> Upper management told me that he "was a high performer" (i.e. had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn't feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part. I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or (ii) I could stay on the team, but I would have to understand that he would most likely give me a poor performance review when review time came around, and there was nothing they could do about that

The second excerpt I quoted in my prior comment indicates that, according to Fowler, a sexist mindset had become enshrined in management's decision-making:

> When I pointed out how few women were in SRE, she recounted with a story about how sometimes certain people of certain genders and ethnic backgrounds were better suited for some jobs than others, so I shouldn't be surprised by the gender ratios in engineering. Our meeting ended with her berating me about keeping email records of things, and told me it was unprofessional to report things via email to HR.

[0] https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...

> an ostensibly non-sexist HR/management would sanction the manager, not Fowler

Are you sure they would have sanctioned the manager if he was gay and harassing a gay subordinate? Everything I've seen says that women are taken much more seriously than men on issues like this, so I'd bet that they wouldn't. They took his side since he was more valuable to the company, not because she was a woman.

>After Fowler thoroughly documented this first incident, an ostensibly non-sexist HR/management would sanction the manager, not Fowler [0]

The initial asshole propositioning her isn't really to blame for the reaction of HR and the management, tho HR/management protecting him and making him feel "safe" to conduct himself this way played very likely a role in this ever happening to her. But still, that guy was an asshole, but not necessarily a sexist or an expression of systematic sexism.

While The first quote from her writeup doesn't yet show sexism in HR/management (just general hostility/toxicity) the second quote, where the HR person mused about races and genders, is very clearly sexist (and racist), no contest there.

I have to disagree.

> Some of the women even had stories about reporting the exact same manager I had reported, and had reported inappropriate interactions with him long before I had even joined the company. It became obvious that both HR and management had been lying about this being "his first offense", and it certainly wasn't his last. Within a few months, he was reported once again for inappropriate behavior, and those who reported him were told it was still his "first offense". The situation was escalated as far up the chain as it could be escalated, and still nothing was done.

Management was sexist and the structure was kept unchanged and unchecked by HR. The jackets event, in addition to others mentioned in the post, are an extension/demonstration of that behavior.

There's no reason it can't be both. Your theory that sociopath executives only exploit people for money and not for other things they personally enjoy is not one that matches my experience.

And of course there's a long history of the "old boys' club" excusing sexist abuse with a "boys will be boys" mentality. So even if we didn't have a lot of evidence of how bro-y Uber was, your notion that they somehow escaped society's baseline level of sexism doesn't really stand up to Occam's Razor.

>Your theory that sociopath executives only exploit people for money and not for other things they personally enjoy is not one that matches my experience.

I think I wasn't clear enough: I'm really pointing at HR, not at general company management. You're absolutely right: corporate executives definitely do exploit people for things other than money (such as sex). I'm only looking at the situation where some manager is sexually harassing someone, and then HR protects the harasser because he's high-up in the corporation. HR isn't getting anything out of this harassment, other than keeping their jobs and furthering the financial interest of the corporation.

I do get your point about the boys' club thing, but I do think it's pretty common for female-led HR departments to also protect abusers. To me, it's just pure sociopathy: HR wants to protect the corporation at all costs, and the person running HR simply doesn't care about the victims at all.

Ah, got it. Good point. Thanks for clarifying!

Did we read the same blog entry?

Her first manager propositioned her for sex almost on day one.

HR lied about that managers past issues and told her suck it up or receive a negative review.

She received a negative review anyways (changed after the fact - her in-person review was positive). This blocked role changes and made her ineligible for graduate tuition reimbursement.

Leather jackets for the men, women told to deal with it.

Threatened by manager with termination because she reported somebody to HR.

While I do agree about the jackets thing being sexist, I would like to point out that this isn't always a man vs. woman thing.

At my current company, they like to buy corporate-branded clothing for employees too. T-shirts, polo shirts, and sweatshirts/hoodies are what they normally get. The last time they got some shirts, I went to go get some, and they were all in L, XL, and XXL sizes. I'm a tall guy, but I'm slim and wear a size M. Other employees, including guys who wear size S, all thought I was weird for not wanting a free sweatshirt that's too large and baggy. Also, there were no female sizes that I can remember, it was just all those huge sizes.

Also, there's the issue of just how far the company needs to go to cover everyone. How many different sizes should they get? My last girlfriend could not wear most normal sizes; even XS was too large for her, and she needed XXS if she could find it. She usually bought her clothes in Asia when she went back there because the only stuff that usually fit her here was in children's sizes (her size is pretty average for women however where she comes from). What does the company need to do for people who are at a size extreme? Quite possibly, the clothing vendor my company uses doesn't even have a size to fit my ex-gf.

But yeah, not even bothering to get the jackets in any women's sizes at all is pretty blatantly sexist.

The way I read it, they actually had all the employees try on jackets and ordered them for each employee, except they turned around and didn't order female jackets because they didn't meet a minimum order size.

That's quite a bit different than ordering a batch of jackets in some array of sizes and hoping most people can find one that fits. That's still a bit shitty, but not nearly as shitty as above.

I'll also note that having been through several rounds of custom clothing orders (for a sports team), getting the count for women's items waived is common, as long as the total order size meets minimums.

Of course none of the above is as shitty as the government agency my neighbor works at that asked the female employees to serve cocktails at a winter social.

>Of course none of the above is as shitty as the government agency my neighbor works at that asked the female employees to serve cocktails at a winter social.

Wow, that's amazing. I wonder which agency this was, and if this is new for this agency or if they were doing this kind of thing before 2016. It sounds like excellent grounds for a lawsuit.

It was a few years ago, and I don't recall where she was at the time (has since changed contracts, for obvious reasons).

I'll both agree and disagree with you, and to some degree with other people replying to your comment.

You're probably correct in thinking this maltreatment extended to men, or generally in ways that weren't specifically sexist. That doesn't mean that the sexist aspect of the maltreatment isn't also true, or an additional or more specific problem.

I'd say it's completely fine that the problems at Uber were presented from a sexist perspective, as that is a more salient and quite likely more damaging perspective.

That said, I do think there's some value to your comment in that it's very likely this kind of culture probably hurt many people in ways that weren't sexist. Highlighting Fowler's perspective, hopefully, doesn't bring to attention sexist problems at the expense of others. I don't feel it does, so far.

You have to almost be intentionally looking the other way not to see the clear sexism at play here.