Susan Fowler: ‘When the time came to blow the whistle on Uber, I was ready’

Before Susan Fowler was a whistleblower she was a violinist, and before she was a violinist she fed fruit flies to spiders that were milked for their venom at a small Arizona business known as Spider Pharm. In February 2017, Fowler was thrown into the public eye after she published a damning blogpost exposing the toxic sexism she experienced working as a software engineer at Uber. And in her new memoir, Whistleblower, she explains how she came to shake up one of the world’s most valuable startups. But, despite the title of her book, Fowler defies one-word labels. She is a musician, a writer, a physicist, a philosopher: a person who demands to be seen, she has written, as more than “that woman who was sexually harassed”.

Six million people read Fowler’s blogpost in which she chronicled her time at what was then the No 1 disrupter in Silicon Valley. In the post – titled “Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber” – Fowler recounted how she was pestered by her new boss on her first official day at the company. “He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn’t,” Fowler recalled. “It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him.” Fowler immediately reported the conversation to HR.

The manager was let off the hook because he was a “high performer”. That was just the beginning of the sexism Fowler would