A textbook case in workplace discrimination
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I'm not sure any of this is going to be newsworthy to HN commenters, but, solidly written.
The title is, of course, godawful. Remember that most story authors don't get to pick their titles.
The author of this piece is the editor-in-chief. (the title edit by the mods is indeed an improvement)
I'm almost glad that the piece turned out to be about rather more banal evil than that (though, still, wtf at the level of callow thoughtlessness).
I know some firms have ethicists on staff, but they seem to be there more to guide and/or provide cover for working with potentially dangerous technology. I don't get the impression that they have much input into shaping the organization's culture beyond signing off on a list of diversity goals. I'd like to be wrong about this, though, can anyone shed more light on this question?
It is a difficult problem and I'm not sure what the solutions are. Perhaps that is why referalls are generally given so much weight by employers: I've always thought of that as a chain of trust starting with the founders and extending right down to lower-level employees. However, a colleague/friend that you know well to be amazing to you might still have rather questionable views on gender/race/nationality etc. which you don't know so even this chain of trust isn't unbreakable...
Machiavelli employs "virtù" to refer to the range of personal qualities that the prince will find it necessary to acquire in order to “maintain his state” and to “achieve great things,” the two standard markers of power for him. This makes it brutally clear there can be no equivalence between the conventional virtues and Machiavellian virtù. Machiavelli expects princes of the highest virtù to be capable, as the situation requires, of behaving in a completely evil fashion. The managers probably thought their actions were in the "raison d'État".
To extend Levy's simile from the article, the male engineers wore the leather jackets with the élan of fighter pilots and the virtù of The Prince.
What idiot thinks this line of thought:
"It would unfair to the men if we paid more for the women's jackets, so we'll just give the men jackets and the women nothing. That seems more fair, right guys"?
makes any sense?
One takeaway was either never give your team/entity anything or always give them exactly the same thing.
Money is always preferred
Examples in class were:
"Define fairness and equality."
"Mary's child is sick and requested to work from home for 2 months. " what do you do as boss and what do you think as coworker?
I'd just prefer to keep legality and courts out of politeness levels. But this situation is better somehow. :/
Also, keep in mind that Fowler's original story noted that when she started 25% of the organization was women, and when she left it was 6%. Have so few women should be a concern, having so few and that's partially because 75% of them have left in roughly a year's time should have been an "all hands on deck, company emergency, we're likely to be sued by multiple parties!" situation.
Unless you have a really good explanation for why that is, chances are you've created an extremely hostile work environment. Even if you do have a good explanation, it's probably in your best interest to look at it with a more critical eye, because the stakes are so high.
I mean, nobody want's to be stuck with such a bad PR nightmare that they feel the need to hire a former attorney general to signal how serious you're taking it. At that point, you're already screwed.
Let's say that the org started with 10 women out of 40, then two left the company for higher offers, one switched teams for a really good opportunity, another was fired for performing poorly, and then the last one is Fowler; meanwhile, a team of 30 men from a bought company was integrated into the org and of the five qualified women who came through the recruiting pipeline only one accepted her offer while 30 men did. Suddenly, there are 6 women out of 100.
1: http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2017/01/12/how-we-accidentally-made-...
Jackets and sexual advances are likely just the symptoms. From Fowler's account it sounds like root cause is a political culture where individuals (esp management) are incentivized to act in their own self interest. Any employee can safely ignore another if that other employee is not politically tied to their personal advancement.
I'd like to think this is the wrong side of history, and that smart people should put their self-worth in acting in ways that optimize the benefit for all stakeholders. However, many political science theories predict just the opposite in large political organizations where selfish actors aggregating power end up at the top.
I know very little about Uber's org, but a leader with a Machiavellian hat on would likely focus on hiring management that are adept at acting politically. A political culture will eventually weed out those who are not.
> I know very little about Uber's org, but a leader with a Machiavellian hat on would likely focus on hiring management that are adept at acting politically.
Travis Kalanick is famously supportive of Objectivism, the philosophy where altruism is for losers and acting purely in motivated self-interest is the highest possible good. Once you know that, very little about Uber will surprise you anymore.
Surprisingly (or not), running a business on Objectivist principles is a terrible idea. See the saga of Eddie Lampert who put Sears into a death spiral that way: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-11/at-sears-... I for one will be delighted to watch Uber follow their lead.
Complicated. I happen to believe that, regardless of how one desires to spin it, everyone already acts in their own motivated self-interest. It's just a question of how wiling you are to see interest and where you draw your connections. For example it is in my personal interest to not harm others usually because harming others makes me feel more bad in many instances than whatever I would stand to gain. Generally speaking when people feel that way we call them good people, and when people don't feel that way we call them sociopaths. The problem isn't that Travis Kalanick believes that he should act in his own self interest. The problem is that Travis Kalanick doesn't feel bad when harming others.
You, for example, have said that what motivates you is self-interest (in various convoluted ways). I won't dispute that. Telling me that you know better than I do what motivates me, without having talked to me? Man, why would you do that?
A combination of genetics and upbringing, I suppose.
Slightly more concretely, it's a predictive model that by my experience always accurately describes what is happening. This could be exemplified by the classic question: "Would you do X (and get away with it) for Y dollars?" Where X can be anything the questioner wants, and Y is a number that starts astronomically high and decreases until the answer is no.
It's risky to assign motives to other people without talking to them.
Sometimes, yes. But I think not in this case. What exactly is the risk here? That at some very deep fundamental level beyond observation and understanding a religious philosopher might tell me that I'm wrong? Ok. So what?
You, for example, have said that what motivates you is self-interest (in various convoluted ways).
More completely what I said is that self-interest includes weighing negative and positive emotion. You willingly do things that make you feel more good than bad. The problem for people here is not Kalanick's self interest. The problem for people is that he doesn't seem to feel bad about hurting others in the same way or to the same degree that they think someone should.
The little I've read about Objectivism (and about Rand) sounds incredibly immature to me. The naive definition of 'self-interest', the stubborn insistence that 'rational' merely means 'doing whatever I want to'. There's no nuance, no depth of understanding.
I'd be interested in reading more about this. Do you have any links, papers, or books you could point people to?
Iron Law of Oligarchy: https://www.britannica.com/topic/iron-law-of-oligarchy
Selectorate Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory
Rules for Rulers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
The Dictators Handbook: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005GPSLHI/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
The Logic of Political Survival: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/logic-political-survival
If this were my team and I somehow faced (at a Director level?) some resistance to the cost for the 6 women's jackets, I would have paid out of my own pocket.
This is either sexist, or an example of their obsession for getting anything for less, including the services of contractor/employees.
Or both.
1. They'd even bat an eyelash at paying retail for the needed quantity, and 2. They'd think it's even remotely ok to exclude a section of the team completely due to any reason (sex, race, size, whatever)
Yes, it's just a jacket, but this definitely smells of a deep seeded cultural problem due to how ludicrous it is.
Wouldn't it be most equitable to just ask which sex clothes you want?
In principle, the opportunity for unfair discrimination is the same as if the company got a discount for their S, M, L, and XL jackets, but did not get a discount for the XS jackets, and actually had to pay extra for the XXL and XXLT jackets.
By offering males their choice of sizes, even if it was just between L or XL, Uber already obviated that argument. If you give garments to all your employees, you really need to have a lot of checkboxes:
[_] XS [_] XL [_] 0 [_] 8-10 [_] Other:
[_] S [_] XLT [_] 2 [_] 12-14 Chest ____ Neck ____ Torso ____
[_] M [_] XXL [_] 4 [_] 16-18 Waist ____ Sleeve ____
[_] L [_] XXLT [_] 6 [_] 20-22 Hips ____ Cuff ____
There's nothing inherently female about size 8-10, or inherently male about size XL. They are simply different sizes. Statistically, those sizes were standardized to fit the greatest number of potential buyers with the fewest variations in pattern parameters. There is a great set of US Army recruit measurement data out there if you wanted to try to design different size categories (for non-obese individuals, due to the inherent military bias), but I think you would have a difficult time doing so.
Otherwise said, guys went to fitting and got just right size of jacket. Nothing sexist about buying women just right size of jacket too.
The facts of the situation are that this is still a he said she said situation, without any direct evidence one way or another.
That's something we should all keep in mind.
And Uber is not denying allegations until they do an investigation on their end. When some sort of evidence comes out, that's when we should be making judgements.
Right now, this is trial by mob.
The people who jump to a microphone to say "nuh uh! not us!" before they've stopped to look at the situation are not people to work for. Because when they're wrong, things are only going to get worse.
It definitely isn't a "he said, she said" situation when there is a physical item (jacket) missing.
You can only claim the presence of an object, not the absence of an object.
Now, if there were evidence besides the blog post that all the men got a jacket as part of the program (maybe a male Uber engineer can say "Hey, I got the jacket, the women didn't get one?" that would be some sort of evidence.
Right now, the claim is that men in a program got the jacket, and women did not. That claim is only made by one woman who was in the program. Corroboration would be great before you start talking about textbook cases and discrimination.
Would it be sexist if the women on the team were offered either the men's jacket, or an opportunity to purchase the women's jacket at a cost equal to the difference in cost between the two (i.e. Uber pays the same in both cases, but the women have to add a bit)?
Would it be acceptable to only be offered one of the two options, or would each woman have to be allowed to choose for themselves?
These questions also implicitly ask whether Uber should be considered to have given the men "a jacket", or "a value equal to the jacket".
Then there is no question of cost or value or function, other than the five seconds required to figure out something the female reports worked on this week.
Would this be an acceptable thing for the manager to do?
> Can you imagine what would have happened if Uber decided, because men gobble more food than women, that only women should get free catering in the company’s cafe, and men would have to reach into their wallets?
My questions don't directly address what happened at Uber, but I'm trying to figure out where the boundaries lie.
Same way with the jackets. If you can't spring for the extra $ for the womens's jackets, you really probably shouldn't be buying jackets for everyone at this time...
With cafeteria food you can either provide free food to all of your employees, or run a cafeteria that charges for food at-cost (the cafeteria cannot operate at a loss).
Having an executive cafeteria used to be a thing in companies. This is discrimination based on employee rank. The IRS treats executive cafeterias as wage compensation. Discriminating between employees of the same rank based on things like race would be racism, sex would be sexism, etc.
The jackets were not provided to certain employees, therefore they are not a perk and their value is wage compensation according to the IRS. So this is exactly like denying all the women SREs a bonus because they are women.
BTW it is very likely that those jackets were deducted as perks so this decision is not just overt discrimination by Uber but also breaking tax law.
Well, yeah. When you have 90% marginal tax rates and the IRS hasn't caught up with taxing non-cash compensation/perks, then you tend to look for every possible perk you can give such employees! Anything short of "okay, what would you spend your next $X of take-home pay on? Tada! That's a perk for you now!"
edit: a now-deleted response to this comment said that an 'ombudsman' can fill the 'problem-solver' role. I am not familiar with how that would work, but that comment said that 'ombudsmen' were effective in their case.
This is why employment laws, with all their warts, are necessary: because the justice system is (or rather, should be) completely independent from capital. The State is the only power that can force employers to act against their own self interest, because it does not rely on their welfare.
I make this comment out loud because I might be wrong, and if there's some insight here about how this train of thought does not occur to you, I'm genuinely curious.
I agree that the meal analogy is not a great one, but I am using it because it was in the article, and another commenter replied to me with it. I try to avoid 'fighting the hypothetical' by changing the example.
When you're on the other side and aren't affected by these issues, it's easy to critique legitimate concerns somewhat academically, ignoring how insensitive it looks to others.
Do those who got a large or XL or XXL jacket have to pay the difference between that and a small?
Who wants to work for someone that cheap?
None of it was like a badge of office, though.
Equality isn't about balancing the checkbook. It's about making sure everyone has the ability to make equally good decisions. Which means giving your team the support they need to be cohesive ("everyone gets a jacket") and allowing them to focus on being an effective member of that team rather than petty and superficial issues ("don't worry about insignificant cost differences.")
If you have a rule that is neutral in theory, but has disparate impact on a protected class in practice, it is not a neutral rule.
The point of the jacket is that they're a part of SRE culture. To have the SRE jacket is to belong to an elite team within the company. And Uber is big enough for that distinction to matter.
If you're going to create a wearable indication of membership in an elite division of your company, you'd damn sure better ensure that every member of that division can actually wear it. Not only did Uber fail to do that, it failed in a way that specifically excluded women.
The jacket thing was less of a big deal to me before I read this story. With the SRE culture refresher, it rises to the level of "among the worst things Uber did".
If you create some kind of badge or wearable emblem of belonging to an elite division inside your company, it's the obligation of the company to ensure that every member of that division can wear it, and it's further egregiously discriminatory if you structure it in such a way that women are actively discouraged from wearing it.
* The failure here transcends "best practices" and reaches the level of "teamicidal".
* While being teamicidal doesn't automatically make you bigoted, if your teamicidal action specifically targets a workplace minority, that does.
I tried to avoid specifically passing judgement on whether or not Uber was discriminatory in my initial comment, as I don't want to be dragged into that morass, and I will not take a 'side' on this case.
I'd agree, but would also suggest not creating a wearable indication of membership. Create multiple wearable indications of membership, and everyone gets one of those indications. Maybe a choice of a jacket, a nice laptop case, a fancy scarf, or a sword with belt scabbard.
Of course we're talking about Uber, so if they did that it would probably be the leather jacket for the men and a string bikini for the women...
Let's say each jacket is $100. You need 126 of them (120 men + 6 women, per the article). Let's say because you're buying 120 men's jackets, you get a 20% bulk discount. That's an $80 unit cost for men's jackets and a $100 unit cost for women's jackets (where you don't qualify for a volume discount).
The idiot manager says, "Wait a second, we said we were OK with an $80-ish per-employee cost... I can't go spending 25% more on some versus others!" This, on its face, is a fair statement.
But the real answer is, "We're buying equivalent goods and our per-employee unit cost is $80.95. Cool? Cool." ($80.95 = [$80 * 120 + $100 * 6] / 126)
So instead of doing the real per-employee math, they stopped at the per-item cost, where it looked out of whack.
Then they were even more idiotic. Let's say the per-employee cost argument was legitimate (remember: it's not). The right answer would then be, "OK, we need to find something equivalent for $80 unit cost." Instead, they opted for a $0 unit cost for women ("no jacket for you"), a 100% differential.
That's not bias or sexism or any of that... it's just idiocy. But it is discrimination, so lawsuit for you. Fire that idiot manager for being an idiot on both risk management and being incompetent.
Quite a lot of this scenario reminds me of a local case that got a bit of press, and it's analogous, as in bad thinking:
Drunk guy takes a cab to hotel, doesn't want to pay cab driver $40, so he punches the cab driver and runs into the hotel. Cab driver follows, has hotel staff call Police. Police get info for drunk guy's room and knock. Drunk guy's friend answers and lets the Police in. Police discover bag after bag after bag full of Tax Return ID theft evidence. Multiple arrests, leading to other arrests in other states. Multi-million dollar bust...over a $40 cab fare...
Yet another instance where "Do unto others" as a basic "Hmm is this fair" moment of reflection can be very enlightening. Other side of the fence type thing. I've been on both sides enough to understand it's not everybody's skill, but, eh, for management it's rather fundamental...
For all the continual PR damage control that the CEO utters, the problem is the CEO and the board. All the bad business practises that are leaking out aren't 'oversights', a generic 'management/process' problem, or actions of an isolated 'bad apple' - it's ingrained culture established by what the CEO allows explicitly or implicitly (through omission of action).
The problem is at the very top of Uber.
Would be interesting to estimate what percentage of the total spend Uber were short-changing their female employees over.
And even if the jackets were customized they were probably embroidered or had embroidered patches applied - the machines used for this are computer-controlled and there is essentially no setup cost involved (besides some time to prepress the art).
I think the jacket issue has Uber clearly in the wrong, but it's a huge stretch to claim that opposition to giving a minority group special privileges is always "standard bigot's code".
There is enough basis in fact for the fat programmer stereotype that this surely must come up now and then.
Another one I've seen is giving out food. My employer gave out hams one Christmas. There was one vegetarian, but he was a vegetarian for health reasons, not moral reasons, and was OK with getting that gift and then giving it to a friend of his who liked ham and everyone was happy.
But what if we'd had someone who was vegetarian for religious reasons? Or someone who was not vegetarian but could not eat ham for religious reasons? Could giving out that ham be construed as discriminating against them on religious grounds? And would it matter that it was given out for Christmas, which is nominally a religious holiday, as opposed to if it had been given out for, say, President's Day, which is completely non-religious?
you get the special order, or get some other style and get the embroidering or whatever, or pick a different thing to get
I accidentally bought a women's cut top at a goth festival once; the extra material across the chest was noticeable when wearing it (though other people didn't notice from just looking, so I happily wore that top for years anyway).
1. There is a horrifying amount of sexual harassment going on at Uber, far more than you'd expect from "a large organization will eventually hire some people who are douchebags," and that sexual harassment is institutionally tolerated at least.
2. Uber has a management culture of politics, infighting, and undercutting each other.
From a moral perspective, #1 is a bigger deal than #2. But from a bloodless amoral "can we get our money out of Uber" perspective, I'd expect investors to be much more concerned about #2.
#1 is pretty easy to deal with. Fire a dozen people in a high profile way, re-instruct HR, and then probably even if you have two dozen (or more) sexual harassers still in your organization, they will be good enough about hiding their tracks that you'll be able to go long enough for the furor to die down. And since large numbers of people just don't want to sexually harass other people, even if they're given lots of opportunity, you probably won't have to fire such large numbers of people that your organization will trip up.
#2 on the other hand: If that culture really is pervasive throughout the management, then they'll have driven all the non-political managers away. What do you do about that? You can't fire everyone between your execs and your ICs. You can't survive long-term with a management culture of backstabbing and empire building -- especially when you're trying to go through a super painful and disciplined process of weaning your company off multi-billion-dollar expenses towards a very distant line of profitability.
But from Fowlers account, it sounds like the culture is well and truly embedded through the whole company. Heck, even HR is burying the issue.
Company culture (what is enabling both #1 and #2 issues) is established by the CEO and board through what they explicitly and implicitly (through omission of action) allow. That means, the problem is at the CEO-level - that's not an easy problem to solve.
Sure you can fire the CEO ... but now #1 is as big a concern to investors as #2.
Yep. That's at least 90% of all startups.
Not that they're all sexist specifically, but when you have an entire economic sector based on "these kids say they can write a program that will revolutionize industry X, let's give them $10 million," you're gonna wind up with what you said.
I also, however, think that the facts are probably misrepresented in this article.
Group buys in fashion are very common, and this is never how they work. Two leather jackets of a different size but the same model will use the same materials and labor. A different jacket model (yes, even a female version), requires different cuts and maybe even different materials.
This isn't uncommon at all, except for the part where Uber thought this made it okay to buy nothing for the women.
Edit: Not even fashion, but anywhere really. If I want 10,000 of one IC, and 5 of another, I will not get a unit discount as if I had bought 10,005 of a generic item. I get a discount on the first IC, and full price on the latter.
Your reaction here is also a part of the problem—these kinds of behavior have been extensively documented inside and outside this industry for nearly a hundred years now. You deny and belittle these people's lived experiences with no data of your own to back it up besides banal theories and "cartoonish" ideas of how people operate in the world.
Another thing for you to think about before you respond to this with your poorly researched screed is that there are literally no upsides to Susan for reporting this stuff. All the data we have show that women who report these kinds of behavior get blacklisted from the industry, shunned by their peers, and perhaps face legal action. This doesn't even count the tidal wave of harassment, death threats and worse that comes along with exposing men in power for doing bad things (depression, suicide, paranoia, etc). Think about how awful your own situation would need to be to open yourself up to that sort of thing. No one does this lightly and without cause, and yes this stuff happens all the time and even worse.
Another good read to improve your ignorance of the matter: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/technology/uber-workplace...
Holy crap computers have been around for 100 years?
> (generally white, straight men)
Citation needed. Also, think about this. What other sort of adjective used to describe people or sexual orientation would be acceptable to describe people fitting a bad image? If you said the same thing about hispanic bisexual women, would that be socially acceptable?
I'm guessing you weren't able to read the "and outside" part of the sentence you glibly quoted. If anything, claiming that it's less than 100 years is the major failure of that statement.
> If you said the same thing about hispanic bisexual women, would that be socially acceptable?
Can you name an environment where hispanic bisexual women are extremely privileged?
I guess then it's just a rhetorical flourish for no added benefit? 100 years ago there was no inside or outside of the industry - what's the point of that statement?
Your PC censorship won't work on this forum. It doesn't matter if it's "socially acceptable" as long as it's true. It's true that it's white, straight men that are generally privileged and ignorant here, and (speaking as a non-white straight man) it's relevant, because the way you're ignorant about things is not having to care about them. I'm much more aware of how my race affects how I interact with the world than about how my gender does.
Bear in mind this discussion is all about people leaping to action on the unsubstantiated claims of one person on their personal blog.
Exactly. As a non-white person, you don't have to care about calling other groups racist, privileged or ignorant. And if somebody is a woman, you don't have to care about calling other people sexist.
And censorship is a strong word. If you want free speech and no censorship, all opinions should be welcomed, and you should not be able to shut down arguments by using identity politics and privilege.
For instance, if you were a male, would your unsubstantiated blog post have had similar impact? That is privilege in a nutshell, that who you are determines how much attention and belief you get.
Things are far, far better for people who speak out in the contemporary tech industry as opposed to fields like banking, finance, big law, big pharma, and oil. Being blacklisted from a company in one of those industries is a death sentence for your career. That simply isn't true for tech (as of right now). The deeply entrenched connections that exist in the aforementioned industries between competing firms and also with the government simply aren't there in tech.
I personally know three women who have been unfairly blacklisted in some of those industries, and it's not right or fair for you to use that as a talking point here, because the consequences are so much more severe when you are unfairly blamed in those cases.
Massive support networks exist for women in tech, and the powerful people in tech don't have the influence necessary to completely bury things like this under the rug. You can still stand up to a company like Uber or Airbnb without them crushing you and everyone who supports you underfoot.
I attended a small local conference a couple years ago that had forgotten/didn't bother to order any women's t-shirts. It wasn't like the organizers had a meeting and said: "lets exclude women" - they just kind of assumed that everybody could wear the same mens cut of shirt and it would be fine.
To their credit, they were fairly mortified when it was pointed out.
I kept asking myself: how could something like that (people being transported on the basement of a ship, chained to one another) possible?
For someone who was not part of that culture and time, seems impossible that so many people could act in such an evil way.
A community culture can shape peoples minds. A company is just a community.
Gender discrimination is real. Very real. What makes this story appear unbelievable is that very few women will risk their careers to speak up against it.
That said, I was wholly unprepared for the brutality of the Atlantic slave trade. Due to the higher round trip times, and lack of mid-trip provisioning, there was a requirement to be more "efficient" than the slave trade across land or sea previously.
As an example, it was news to me that slavery was still practiced in parts of the Middle East until the 60s, and probably still exists in a less obvious manner today. I was really horrified to learn that tons of slaves left Africa via the Eastern trade routes, and the brutality of those owners is why there's little to no visible evidence of slavery in those parts of the world. Evidence meaning descendants of said slaves.
1) being captured by your neighbors, sold to some tribe of slave traders, then resold to ship-owning slave traders, then resold at auction on a different continent, and finally landing on a plantation where the intentional and systematic removal of your human dignity is completed over years in squalid conditions, and
2) not having your company buy you a leather jacket while you're being paid a salary that puts you somewhere in the top 2% of all of humanity.
It's this sort of hyperbole that makes the problem less likely to be solved, since it makes it all seem relatively trivial.
This is what's wrong with American education.
OK: Yes, it does. Absolutely.
Have you worked in tech?
Edit: the definitive comedy sketch on the subject "Are we the bad guys?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU
1. Everyone is lying about their experiences just for pageviews / attention
2. You haven't experienced the described culture first hand, and are rejecting something you haven't seen as "weird alternate reality".
Is it that implausible that a manager would not want to pay $200 for women's jackets when he is getting the the men's jackets for $100 (numbers made up obviously). That's not Tumblr novella cartoon evil, it's not even "evil", it's just stupidity.
"A lot of people need to be evil for this story to make sense" is not an Occam's-razor counterargument, it is the unfortunate truth.