The then-CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick, who had once joked that the company's nickname was "Boober" for the female attention it generated, was ousted following a series of events triggered by the blog post. More than 20 other employees who were accused of harassment were terminated as well.
Susan, in her post said, “When I joined Uber, the organization I was part of was over 25% women. By the time I was trying to transfer to another eng organization, this number had dropped down to less than 6%.” She brought to light several harassment and sexism issues that the culture of Uber was rife with and she even recounted how Uber’s human resources team didn’t punish her manager who had been lewd and sexual in his advances based on his ‘stellar record’.
Susan's life story is an inspirational one. Having never graduated from high school, she instead worked baby sitting jobs and then a as ranch hand. She taught herself in the local library as she was determined to pursue education further. She started pursuing philosophy at Arizona State University and then transferred to UPenn to earn a degree in Physics, despite not having a formal education in mathematics. When she joined Uber at 24, she was a physicist and a computer scientist and she even published her
first book about production ready microservices
while working at Uber.
After the post came out, Susan said that she did not imagine the post would an impact of this magnitude. “I expected the reaction to die down, but it never did,” she said in an interview to Financial Times. “It became much bigger than me, so much bigger than Uber.”