<em>Whistleblower</em>: When a Memoir Is Also an Indictment

Just over three years ago, on February 19, 2017, Susan Fowler published a blog post. “I’ve gotten a lot of questions over the past couple of months about why I left and what my time at Uber was like,” she began. “It’s a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in my mind, so here we go.”

Slightly horrifying, it would turn out, was an understatement. The post documented a pattern of discrimination and harassment at the company that had made it its public mission to change the way people move through the world. On her first day as a site-reliability engineer, Fowler wrote, her manager propositioned her for sex via Uber’s internal chat system. Later, another manager gave Fowler a glowing performance review; he amended it after the fact, she wrote, in order to limit her freedom to move to another team within Uber—and additionally, she speculated, to take credit for keeping a woman as a direct report when relatively few women worked at the company. At another point, after Uber had decided to buy its engineers