Susan Fowler is a former site reliability engineer (SRE) at Uber In 2017, Fowler, then 25, blogged on her website (opens in new tab) detailing the sexual harassment she faced at the ride-sharing company during her two-year tenure. Her post went viral, resulting in the ouster of Uber's CEO and a major reckoning in Silicon Valley. Here, in an excerpt from her new book, Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and the Fight for Justice at Uber (opens in new tab), Fowler recounts her experience at Uber's Christmas Fowler describes his experience at an Uber Christmas party.

The Christmas season was fast approaching, and on Friday, December 18, Uber hosted its annual holiday party. In the weeks leading up to the party, as I was attending various new hire training programs, the party was the topic of conversation. Because of Beyonce's private concert on the infamous "Las Vegas trip" (open in new tab), everyone was sure she (or someone just as famous) would be the musical guest for the evening. I had never been to a holiday party in Silicon Valley. The only Christmas parties I had ever been to were the ones at my family's church and the loud, drunken parties at the University of Pennsylvania's physics department. This was going to be something completely different; Uber was a company that prided itself on lavish, fancy parties. Everyone around me seemed to have planned months in advance what to wear and who to bring

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After some very careful googling and consideration of what women wear to holiday parties in Silicon Valley, I bought a purple velvet dress that wasn't too conservative or too revealing. Now all I had to do was get a date. I was single at the time and had sworn off dating, so I asked an old friend from my ASU days who lived and worked in San Francisco to go with me.

Uber rented out two huge buildings on one of the Embarcadero piers for the party. It was raining heavily that night, and of course we arrived by Uber and drove through the rain into the first building.

Inside, everyone was dressed to the nines, dancing, drinking, laughing, and socializing under the flashing lights. In another room there was a "silent disco," with DJ music blaring and everyone wearing headphones; in the passageway between the two buildings, staff were waiting and handing out umbrellas to party guests. We grabbed our umbrellas and ran to the next building. There they had a dance floor with a well-known DJ and the usual disco going on. The first building's party was one of the nicest parties I've ever seen, but this one blew away everything, even the Philadelphia Museum of Art party I attended when I first started at the University of Pennsylvania. It was sophisticated and everything. Other employees didn't seem to think it was particularly fancy, but to me, who grew up poor and had never been to a prom or even a real party except for an orientation party at the University of Pennsylvania, it was like something out of a movie. My friends and I laughed as we compared it to the old parties we used to go to at ASU. There, 50 people were crammed into someone's two-bedroom apartment with cheap kegs from the drive-through liquor store, dancing for hours around the pool at the apartment complex.

We grabbed a drink from one of the many open bars, ran onto the dance floor, and danced the night away. We didn't know many people in the company yet, so it was nice to have a close friend with us. At one point, between songs, I jumped off the dance floor to catch my breath. From where I was standing, near the DJ booth, I could see the entire floor of the building. At that point, most of the partygoers were standing aside and only a handful of guests were dancing. I could not understand why more people were not out enjoying the party.

As I stood there and took in the scene, I noticed the CEO standing right next to me. I turned to him. 'Why isn't anyone dancing?' I shouted over the music and pointed to the bystanders, most of whom were employees standing and drinking. He was staring at the dance floor. I joked, "What a waste of a good DJ. I said, "You should get out there and encourage everyone to dance." I returned to the dance floor, put on my heels, and danced until my feet went numb. My friends and I stayed until the very end, when the lights came back on and people began dismantling the soundstage.

The party was fun, but I couldn't shake the feeling that something was not quite right; between the strange things that had happened at Uberversity and the lack of joy at the party, something seemed very wrong about this company. I tried to ignore the alarms ringing in my head. My first day with my new team was Monday, and with only a few days to go, I sincerely hoped I was wrong about Uber.

Adapted from WHISTLEBLOWER by Susan Fowler, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2020 by Susan Rigetti.