Ellen Pao Loses Silicon Valley Bias Case Against Kleiner Perkins

Let&#x27;s not let the outcome of this specific case affect the idea that there is an institutional bias - conscious or unconscious - against women entering and thriving in male-dominated fields like this one.<p>Just as one flurry in April doesn&#x27;t disprove global warming, one dismissed lawsuit doesn&#x27;t disprove a deep but sometimes subtle sexism. It&#x27;s the same with other powerful prejudices that have endured for centuries or millennia.<p>There are many factors acting against women, just as there are many working against people of color, the poor, and those who do not cleave to traditional sexual or gender norms. Please do what you can to support these people in your life, in all their endeavors.

If you know the principals involved, or saw everything the jury saw (including legal instructions from the judge), you might have a valid opinion on why any particular legal result is either scandalous or righteous.<p>But if you&#x27;re just a distant spectator, cheering a team based on general affinities to the <i>kind</i> of people on either side, or general causes without regard to the case specifics... then you&#x27;re actually part of the problem, making workplaces and communities unfair to real people based on superficialities and acquired prejudices.

&gt; Ms. Pao, it emerged in testimony, compiled a “resentment” chart of colleagues who, she believed, wronged her.<p>Wow. How petty. There&#x27;s so many things that came from this case that make me question how much of the testimony from her is real and how much of it is in her head.<p>Another example, from a recent re&#x2F;code article:<p>&gt; Ellen Pao said she filed her gender discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins Caufield &amp; Byers partly because of three female administrative assistants who had been discriminated against because of their gender<p>&gt; There is only one problem: No one in the courtroom seems to know where these admins are. No one seems to know the details of their grievances. No one in court, including Pao, even knows all their names.<p>And then:<p>&gt; Pao also said she was told by Kleiner Perkins talent partner Juliet de Baubigny that Nazre was a “sex addict.” To her, that pointed to a larger unspoken history. “I thought she must have additional information and maybe about the administrative assistants,” Pao said.<p>&gt; Asked on the stand today whether she ever called Nazre a “sex addict,” de Baubigny replied, “No, that is completely ridiculous.”

That article isn&#x27;t trying to remain impartial at all.<p>By about half way down they gave up all pretence and started arguing that Pao&#x27;s case was valid&#x2F;accurate even if the jury disagreed.<p>You&#x27;d almost think the author forgot she actually lost. 12 people decided she had no case, what would be enough for this author? 20? 50? I doubt even that would do it, they&#x27;ve pre-decided what actually occurred.

I encourage everybody to read the closing arguments liveblog at <a href="http://recode.net/2015/03/24/live-closing-arguments-in-ellen-paos-gender-discrimination-case-against-kleiner-perkins/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;recode.net&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;24&#x2F;live-closing-arguments-in-ellen...</a> to see the defense&#x27;s side of the story that is at least based on facts established during the trial before believing seriously biased mainstream news stories unquestioningly repeating Pao&#x27;s initial claims (or HN posters jumping to conclusions with their claims of &quot;damning&quot; testimony or &quot;sexual harassment.&quot;) The VCs might be assholes and there is real harassment happening but there was just no evidence of discrimination in this particular case and if it was decided differently, it would have been a setback to both men and women in the workplace.

Good time to be woman in tech. My company has a special program to identify and promote specifically women to management roles. Not meritocracy. Even a male in a team works and performs better, he loses because the policy is to get some percentage of women into leadership. Let the down voting begin.

Not so fast: <a href="https://twitter.com/NellieBowles/status/581566725889490944" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;NellieBowles&#x2F;status&#x2F;581566725889490944</a><p>&gt; <i>The jury was 8&#x2F;4 on one count, so the judge says he can&#x27;t accept the verdict right now, has sent them back into deliberations.</i>

Firms that are bad to their employees get busted fast.<p>Firms that are bad to their employees - that comes from the top people who set the tone and culture. If the people at the top were bad, KPCB would have been kaput LONG LONG AGO.<p>KPCB has been around for FORTY THREE years. If the people at the top -- who are still there after all this time -- were bad to their employees, we&#x27;d have heard about it a LONG time ago.<p>John Doerr runs the firm. John Doerr has been there for Thirty-Five Years. We would have known long ago if KPCB was bad to their employees, because the same people have been at the top running the firm all this time.<p>After you&#x27;ve been in the workplace (and this may not apply if you&#x27;re just an &#x27;individual contributor&#x27; type of person) and seen the narcissism up close -- and seen it more than once -- and you&#x27;ve read the description of the &#x27;narcissistic personality disorder&#x27; profile -- you&#x27;d see Ellen Pao all over:<p>* Pretending to be more important than they really are<p>* Bragging (subtly but persistently) and exaggerating their achievements<p>* Claiming to be an &quot;expert&quot; at many things<p>* Inability to view the world from the perspective of other people<p>* An obvious self-focus in interpersonal exchanges<p>* Problems in sustaining satisfying relationships<p>In short, she had problems with others at KPCB. The jury saw that John Doerr <i>very gently</i> tried to help her. That was all the way back in 2006, at her very first review.<p>From 2005 until she was fired, she was working there on borrowed time. Anyone else with the consistently bad teamwork skills would have been let go LONG ago. Only because the head of the firm, John Doerr, tried over and over to help her &#x27;get over herself&#x27;, was she able to remain employed there.<p>Again, if you&#x27;ve ever worked with this type of personality, you&#x27;d have known, after reading her history (link below), that her lawsuit was the narcissist&#x27; siren call, &quot;I know I did well, and no one else thinks I did, so they need to be punished&quot;.<p><a href="http://www.paradisepost.com/business/20150304/john-doerr-testifies-he-fought-to-keep-ellen-pao" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paradisepost.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;20150304&#x2F;john-doerr-tes...</a>

I think it is very clear that there is an environment in tech world that is off putting to women and it probably discriminates against women in general.<p>But it isn&#x27;t at all clear to me that Ellen Pao got rejected from partnership because she was a woman.<p>I assume that is why the jury sided with Kleiner Perkins.

I only followed this from afar, but my understanding is that the defense did a terrific job and that&#x27;s the main reason Pao lost. They were able to successfully paint her as someone who is very unpleasant to work with and not entirely honest either. Once her character was assassinated, it was easy to sway the jury against her.<p>I may be wrong though.

Apparently the judge sent them back to further deliberate the claim that she was fired for this lawsuit.

$33k&#x2F;month severance plus benefits and bonus? It&#x27;s absurd how much money venture capitalists make for essentially handing out money.

This is a hypothetical question: given the public information Ellen Pao was going spend a couple of weeks on this trial, plus a lot of other distractions that came with the trial, would the Reddit board have been biased if they had not picked her as interim CEO, with the reason being that she might not have devoted enough time and mental effort to running the company?

I was totally sympathetic to Ellen Pao therefore I&#x27;m interested to hear why the jury sided with the defense. Does anyone know if there are any undisputable facts or was it basically he said&#x2F;she said?

I&#x27;ve always liked the analogy to Barry Bonds for this kind of thing. There&#x27;s a famous quote out there that goes something like, you can&#x27;t point to any specific home run and say &quot;he hit that one because of steroids,&quot; but you can be sure he hit more home runs because of them.<p>I think that kind of reasoning applies equally here. You can&#x27;t necessarily point to bias for any given case (or at least not this one), but that doesn&#x27;t mean the bias isn&#x27;t there.

&gt; ... the freewheeling ways of the male-dominated technology industry increasingly drew scrutiny.<p>&gt; Episodes of men behaving badly make the news frequently here, whether it is sexism or harassment in the workplace or just derogatory attitudes toward women.<p>So the story in the NYT is that it&#x27;s a story in the NYT (unless by &quot;here&quot; the author means tech or SV? Either way, Narrative is a juggernaut. The thinking and the story becomes more founded in what people are saying than what is.)

I wonder what KP offered before trial. I guess not more than $1m or maybe she would have settled?

As a side note, I think the current US anti-discrimination laws are probably flawed, not because discrimination is not bad but because of problems with enforcement. I am thinking of imposing anti-discrimination conditions on specific companies instead.

This is hard. Nothing about this is easy.<p>Moving forward, we should all work to make workplaces where everyone can feel wanted. I don&#x27;t think Race or Gender matters and I would not want to work somewhere where it does. I want to work in a place where the caliber of my work is what matters, not the color of my skin or my genitals.<p>This is a long battle that may never be won, but it doesn&#x27;t mean we should stop fighting.

I found this section both amusing and revealing:<p><i>One of the stranger points brought up in testimony was how Ms. Pao, before she was married, had dated a colleague for six months without ever realizing he was still living with his wife.</i><p>It seems that male nerds are not the only archetype of social ineptitude.

Link to the recode.net live stream:<p><a href="http://recode.net/2015/03/27/live-the-pao-v-kleiner-perkins-verdict/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;recode.net&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;27&#x2F;live-the-pao-v-kleiner-perkins-...</a>

Couldn&#x27;t a lot of problems be averted if companies were more aggressive in frowning upon romantic relationships in the workplace?

Court cases aren&#x27;t just about the verdict. What was revealed about the inner culture of KP was very enlightening...and I suspect we&#x27;re about to be enlightened about similar things at Facebook and Twitter.<p>If at the very least these conversations start happening out in the open, this case is a large step forward for the gender discussion in tech.

So she had an affair with her superior right? I think its strange how many articles and interviews I have heard in the last two days where somehow that is not mentioned.

There was a time when &#x27;tech news&#x27; was about computers.

I wonder if there&#x27;ll be blowback against ms pao as a result of this verdict. She did much to harm successful womens&#x27; reputations in the tech industry with her behavior and innapropriate lawsuit.<p>They&#x27;re already having to bury&#x2F;censor threads concerning this case at reddit, her new company.

Awful title (&quot;Silicon Valley Bias Claims Rejected&quot;).<p>A jury found that Kleiner Perkins did not, based on evidence Pao submitted, find sufficient cause to believe that <i>the firm itself</i> was not in violation of the Civil Rights Act.<p>I would (very hesitantly) agree with that verdict. Sloppy HR and disgusting office politics and fraudulent performance reviews? Yes. Intentional gender discrimination? Probably not.<p>Silicon Valley is still as biased and unfair as ever. It will probably get worse, after this verdict. A better title would be &quot;Kleiner Perkins Not Proven Guilty of Gender Discrimination, Jury Says&quot;.

I find it very interesting that the african american woman and the hispanic man in the jury - both minorities voted &quot;yes&quot; while the predominantly white and asian jurors voted &quot;no&quot;. Is it possible that people who are discriminated against understand the subtle biases which cannot be captured by evidence or law.