Whistleblower

Susan Fowler published a blog post in February 2017 describing her experience as an engineer at Uber, which produced an internal investigation, the departure of numerous executives including the chief executive, and a broader reckoning in the technology industry. This memoir covers her life before and after.

The substantive account of Uber describes what she documented at the time: a manager who propositioned her on her first day on his team, the human resources response that he was a high performer and that this was his first offence, her discovery that other women had reported the same manager, the subsequent obstruction of her transfers, the performance review altered retroactively, and the threat of termination when she continued to report. She documents that she kept records of every interaction, which is what made the account unassailable when she published it.

The memoir also covers her upbringing in rural Arizona, her education, and her experience at other institutions including a Wall Street firm and academic physics, where she describes comparable treatment. She writes about the decision to publish under her own name and about the consequences, including surveillance and pressure. The book is a personal account and does not analyse organisational structure. Its practical content is the demonstration that contemporaneous documentation is what makes a report actionable and what protects the person making it.