Susan Fowler

I took the lawyers’ advice and decided to move on with my life. But before I did, I carefully documented everything, saving every email, every call log, every text message. There was part of me that wondered if perhaps I’d change my mind about suing them in the future. And there was another part of me that thought I’d want to write about it someday. My heart broke when I realized that moving on meant giving up on my dream. The professors I’d been counting on for letters of recommendation now refused to talk to me because of the situation with Tim, and without the recommendation letters I needed, I knew I would never be accepted into a physics PhD program. So I trashed my graduate school applications and, with them, my hopes of becoming a physicist.

Everyone went out for drinks that night to celebrate the two new employees: me and the new office manager, Heidi. We were the only women in the office; as I later learned, they had us start on the same day so that we wouldn’t feel “alone.”

Within a few days, I found out that my boss—who managed me and one other employee—was openly, unabashedly sexist. He commented on my clothing, making fun of me if I ever dressed nicely and telling me I was dumpy if I wore jeans and a T-shirt. He told me that he bet any man I was dating was off secretly having sex with prostitutes. He was also anti-Semitic, frequently commenting about how “stingy” and “Jewish” he thought the founders were (I didn’t dare tell him that I was Jewish, too). The only way I could deal with it was to keep my head down, do my work, and try not to pay attention to anything he said. To keep myself sane, I read the philosophers Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius every morning on my way to work and during my lunch breaks.

The words of the Stoics reinforced what I already knew: I couldn’t control what others did to me, but I could control how I reacted.

What I didn’t know at the time was that the mere fact that there was no public record of wrongdoing wasn’t because Uber had a spotless record, but because all Uber employees were bound by forced arbitration. Forced arbitration clauses are often included in employment agreements that workers must sign as a condition of employment, usually on their very first day of work—not only at tech companies like Uber, but at many companies in the United States.

Uber encouraged employees to spend time working with their coworkers over the holidays rather than with their families and offered employees free all-inclusive trips almost anywhere in the world if they chose work over family.

Then she gave me a “choice”: I could stay on the cloud team, with Jake as my manager—though I would likely receive a bad performance review from him because I had turned down his advances and reported him to HR—or I could transfer to a different SRE team.

Rigetti Quantum Computing and Uber Technologies were at opposite ends of the spectrum: Chad wanted Rigetti Quantum Computing to be a company filled with joy, where people came into work excited and passionate about the technical challenges of building quantum computers and working as a team to solve hard problems; Uber, on the other hand, was a company driven by aggression, hell-bent on destroying the competition no matter the cost, where it felt like people came into work to tear down, not to build up.