Some considerations on boycotting Uber.

1. We already have a couple ways to ensure that companies treat their workers well. Probably the most important one is the job market: if companies treat their workers badly, the workers will find different jobs. (Like, on the one hand it’s horrifying that the percentage of women in SRE apparently went from over 25% to 3% while Susan Fowler was there … but also like, that is how it’s supposed to work? If a company is a bad environment for women, women will leave and find somewhere better.) And in addition to the market, we have laws: things like minimum wage and discrimination/sexual harassment laws.

Whereas we really only have one mechanism for ensuring that companies provide services efficiently and thus create consumer surplus, and that’s consumer decisions. If consumers are mostly making decisions based on things other than consumer surplus that seems bad.

2. The process of boycotting companies because posts about them went viral among your facebook friends is … fraught. It would be one thing to boycott companies systematically if they have labor practices that are worse than some threshold, but of course that’s impossibly hard and no one’s going to do that. 

And there are reasons that you read Susan Fowler’s post in particular.

For one, Uber hires women. If they simply hired very few women and had never hired Susan Fowler, some people would look at the statistics and be annoyed, but a statistic can’t go viral in the same way.

For another, Uber wasn’t trying to screen out women for how outspoken they were or how willing they were to stand up to injustice. Or if they were, they were doing a pretty shitty job.

And of course, the person who was hurt could have easily been your friend. She’s a white woman who went to Stanford and works at Stripe and likes Ted Chiang and hiking and the philosophy of physics. Stories from people like that are always going to have more influence on you than they should.

3. If you think about it, you probably have some opinion on the effects of Uber’s success or failure on the future of the world. Maybe you think that a rideshare monopoly would be really bad, so you hope Lyft and other rivals start doing better in comparison. Or maybe you think the network effects of a single universal rideshare company would be really valuable. Maybe you think that the future of self-driving cars will look better if Google gets there before Uber, or the other way around.

There are … apparently five women in Uber SRE? Maybe there are 100 female engineers in the company? Even if your opinion on the above questions is really weak, it’s still going to outweigh whatever effect Uber’s work environment has on its female employees. If you want your patronage of the company to depend on the good it does for people besides you, think about all of the people.

(I feel kind of apologetic about writing on this topic–it’s somehow not want I want the aesthetic of my blog to be. But I ended up in a dinner party conversation about this with @mens-et and some other people last night. So here you go.)