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.
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.
> 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.