Susan Fowler’s story is headed for the big screen. The woman behind the headline-making “Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber” blog post is joining forces with “Hidden Figures” scribe Allison Schroeder and production company Good Universe for a feature film. The untitled project will present Fowler’s experiences with Uber’s sexist, sexual harassment-filled culture. It is described as “‘Erin Brockovich’ meets ‘The Social Network.’”
Schroeder will pen the film, and former Disney exec Kristin Burr (“Freaky Friday”) will produce, The Hollywood Reporter confirms. No word on a director yet.
Fowler’s Uber blog post recounted the widespread misogyny at the ride share company, “which has been described as indicative of the overall sexist Silicon Valley culture,” THR adds. Her story led to an investigation and, ultimately, CEO Travis Kalanick’s resignation in June.
“When I joined Uber, the organization I was part of was over 25 percent women. By the time I was trying to transfer to another eng [engineering] organization, this number had dropped down to less than six percent,” Fowler’s post reveals. “Women were transferring out of the organization, and those who couldn’t transfer were quitting or preparing to quit. There were two major reasons for this: there was the organizational chaos, and there was also the sexism within the organization. When I asked our director at an org all-hands about what was being done about the dwindling numbers of women in the org compared to the rest of the company, his reply was, in a nutshell, that the women of Uber just needed to step up and be better engineers.”
Fowler currently works as the Editor in Chief at Increment, a print and digital publication that offers guidance on how to build and operate software as part of a team. She’s also an author.
Schroeder wrote “Hidden Figures” with the film’s director, Theodore Melfi. The film is based on the true story of Katherine G. Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), brilliant African-American women who played an instrumental role in the space race. She sold a scripted drama about an aspiring songwriter to E! earlier this year. She’s also doing additional writing for Marc Forster’s “Christopher Robin,” a feature that sees the grown A.A. Milne character reuniting with his beloved childhood friend, Winnie-the-Pooh.
