The Ellen Pao Trial and Silicon Valley

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-17/the-trial-that-makes-silicon-valley-shudder

by bko • 11 years ago

41 61 11 years ago

fweespeech6• 11 years ago

That said, a Kleiner victory is well within the realm of the possible. Many women in the tech industry are concerned that Pao’s case is weak and that her accusations might exacerbate bias in the workplace. "I worry that it will make a lot more men feel that—being nice to and mentoring and trying to be a good person toward women colleagues—they, too, will be hauled before a jury," says Melinda Riechert, managing partner in the Silicon Valley office of law firm Morgan Lewis. For example, a key allegation in the case is that a Kleiner partner, Randy Komisar, behaved inappropriately when he gave Pao a volume of Leonard Cohen’s poems and drawings (entitled Book of Longing) on Valentine’s Day and asked her out to dinner on a night when his wife was out of town. Komisar says it was completely friendly and that his wife bought the book for Pao. Will men now retreat from cordial gestures toward female colleagues?

Does anyone else not see the immediate disconnect here?

I agree that Pao's case is weak but:

It juxtaposes that with a woman saying something about "being nice and mentoring" while pointing out at the same time a married man is handing out gifts on Valentine's Day.

I mean, come on. Does anyone seriously think that was anything other than hitting on Pao?

Any other day of the year it would have been fine. That specific day out of the 365 options was picked solely for that implication. It just feels weird to me that they'd compose things that way in the article.

"Being nice" - Doing nice things for a woman on days other than those dedicated to romance.

"Hitting on a woman" - Doing nice things and inviting her to be alone with you on a day dedicated to romance.

How is this not a clear line?

Shivetya• 11 years ago

well she did have an affair with a married coworker, so how are other men supposed to judge her? You make that kind of serious mistake in a professional environment and people are right to judge your competence. They did try/fire the guy involved over her objection.

As for handing out valentine gifts, hell my entire work place would be in trouble for gifts, cards, and the like. We celebrate a lot different events, though you learn real quick whom to avoid as some people look to take offense; not saying she did. The can subpoena the gift giver's wife to see if that side of his story holds up. As for asking her out, she already demonstrated that marriage was no barrier.

Let's be honest. We only get a picture, one tinted by personal views and time. It will be interesting what the court digs up and how the final determination comes about.

fweespeech6• 11 years ago

As for handing out valentine gifts, hell my entire work place would be in trouble for gifts, cards, and the like.

Oddly enough, where I work, the accepted standard is you simply don't hand out stuff to coworkers on Valentines.

I mean it is one f'n day of the year, how hard is it to avoid that unless your sole goal is to entice someone?

We celebrate a lot different events

I think you are making my point for me. Any event except Valentines/romance related, the behavior would have been appropriate. Specifically doing it on Valentines with the unspoken implication of he'd be alone with her and his wife would be out of town....? :/

Let's be honest. We only get a picture, one tinted by personal views and time. It will be interesting what the court digs up and how the final determination comes about.

Of course. However, it disgusts me that the article seems to imply that "hitting on a woman" and "being nice/mentoring" is the same behavior as the positioning of that quote implied.

rimunroe3• 11 years ago

Having an affair with one married coworker doesn't give other coworkers license to hit on you.

The argument you're using is basically, "She slept with someone else, so why should other people not expect to be able to get to have privileged relationships with her too?"

And even if you ignore that, you obviously shouldn't be hitting on people at work.

lisa_henderson• 11 years ago

Agree strongly with this: "Does anyone seriously think that was anything other than hitting on Pao?"

Any man who is beyond college age, and who sincerely does not realize the meaning of handing out gifts and asking women out to dinner, is an idiot and should be removed from any position of authority. Emphasis on "sincerely" -- Randy Komisar is not that stupid, and his denials are hardly sincere.

The line "his wife bought the gift for her" has become something of a cliche which married couples use when the husband has been caught flirting but the wife is not yet ready to end the marriage.

Gifts given in public, for work well done, are always welcome, but a pattern of private gifts and requests for dinner are universally understood to be requests to initiate a sexual relationship.

One last word about "sincerely" -- there are some men who sincerely are that stupid. I have known at least 2. They somehow reach middle age and it does not occur to them that the gifts they are giving to an attractive young woman are being interpreted as sexual overtures. As Schiller said, "Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain." There is no cure for such men, but they need to be kept out of positions of power.

rhino3692• 11 years ago

Hitting on a woman isn't even illegal unless there is a threat of coercion or it is so frequent/severe that it creates a hostile work environment.

I'm sure Pao's attorneys are arguing it is a part of a larger hostile work environment. But itself isn't sexual harassment.

fweespeech6• 11 years ago

It was in reference to the quote and the implication that the two were equivalent and equal.

Mentoring and being nice to a woman is very, very different than flirting with her. Implying they are the same is gross.

anaximander2• 11 years ago

I think the author of this article made it (perhaps deliberately) ambiguous as to when these events took place.

he gave Pao a volume of Leonard Cohen’s poems and drawings (entitled Book of Longing) on Valentine’s Day and asked her out to dinner on a night when his wife was out of town

These could very well be two completely separate occasions. I suspect the author created this juxtaposition to elicit your precise reaction.

fweespeech6• 11 years ago

Why do you think that?

There are plenty of articles that agree the gift was given on Valentine's Day?

adevine2• 11 years ago

This is why I feel it's just better to refrain from any sort of judgment on this case based on what you read in the news. You're right - as it's written, it looks like "Duh, he's hitting on her." But did he give a gift to everyone on Valentine's Day? When he "asked her out to dinner on a night when his wife was out of town", was it a date or a "Let's talk about a potential investment at a popular VC haunt"?

I have no idea which is true, and I don't think I'm going to be able to find out based on summaries in the news.

kzhahou• 11 years ago

I don't find the dinner invitation to be damning in the slightest. Have you all not been around VCs? They're always having dinner, having multiple dinners in one night, flitting from one company to another, to some new prospect, whatever. On this night, he has no plans, his wife is out, so he invites a coworker to grab food after work. So what? Things will get steamy at University Cafe?

malvosenior10• 11 years ago

I don't think this trial has much to do with larger women in tech issues. There's a lot of politics at play for ALL employees of VC firms and this doesn't sound any different.

If you've been following all of the coverage of this case, Pao isn't coming off well.

She states that it was discriminatory that she didn't get her review on time. Unprofessional to have a delayed review? Yes. Gender harassment? No. Instead of doing her review, they just gave her a bonus of $150,000 and a $40,000 raise (that she claims not to remember).

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/ellen-pao-was-res...

From this article:

Pao has also raised an incident in which one of the firm’s senior partners, former Hewlett-Packard Chairman Ray Lane, asked her and a second female colleague to takes notes at a partners' meeting. "I just froze, I wasn’t sure what to do," Pao testified on the stand.

I'm a man in a managerial position. I've been asked to take notes many times in meetings. Sometimes I do, sometimes I have to talk a lot and so someone else has to.

Kleiner waited too long to fire a male partner who seemed to be treating the firm as his own private dating website.

Pao and Nazre were dating and both married at the time. There's a ton of he said she said, but to put it all on Nazre isn't fair.

[EDIT] I was incorrect about this. See Anechoic's comment below.

Pao has stated that she took the Reddit CEO role because she couldn't get a job as an investor. Honestly, Reddit CEO sounds like a much better job than all but the most senior of investment positions.

There's a lot to this story, and it's getting legs because gender issues in tech are a HOT topic right now. I don't see any of this case having larger implications though.

[EDIT] Please don't just downvote me. If you disagree, leave a reply.

ditonal4• 11 years ago

I don't see how you could possibly not see how it has larger implications. For years we've been told that the reason there's no women in tech is because of all us sexist brogrammers, despite the typical programmer being the opposite of a 'bro', while the VCs very much resemble them, and somehow VCs being 96% male with most top firms having NO women as partners slips by unnoticed. VCs intentionally create frat house cultures at the tech companies they invest in because they assume it saves them money to hire misfit programmers who need a workplace to provide a social life rather than act like processionals and demand professional compensation, and that frat house culture is also antagonistic to people who aren't young males. Finally, I don't see how you could read a case where a VC firm made mis-step after mis-step, and a highly qualified woman suggested they invest in winners like Twitter only to be ignored, and brushed off for invites to the Democrats the VCs are in bed with like Al Gore, and not see how she clearly as an extremely strong case of gender discrimination against a rich and powerful sect of elite VCs who have hidden their sickening behavior in the shadows for far too long.

thejaredhooper2• 11 years ago

I think that she just might've just been a bad egg, given the facts presented in the article.

malvosenior10• 11 years ago

You're throwing a lot of opinion out there that's not backed by evidence or even anecdote.

I currently work for a VC funded company and have worked for several in the past. I would not describe any of them as "frat house cultures". You're making some pretty sweeping generalizations.

The dinner with Al Gore was for senior partners and there WAS women invited, they just couldn't make it. Here's Mary Meeker on the subject:

http://recode.net/2015/03/16/liveblog-mary-meeker-testifies-...

a highly qualified woman suggested they invest in winners like Twitter only to be ignored

We don't know the fully story here. They had already looked at investing in Twitter and passed. A mistake? Sure. But anti-portfolios are famous. Whether Pao is "highly qualified" or not is debatable. Has she made any successful investments? Was she previously a successful entrepreneur? Those are things that would make you highly qualified to be a VC.

I don't see anything "sickening" here.

bane4• 11 years ago

Yes, this case is exposing the sordid 1950's style inner workings at a modern VC, as it should.

The issue is that Pao is a lousy person to get behind on many of the issues she's the complainant on. She appeared to have routinely crossed good social boundaries that she's now complaining about, and was well rewarded for her work, receiving sizable bonuses for missing a performance eval.

I wish on my wildest dreams my reviews went as poorly as the ones she's taking issue with.

She still has plenty of valid complaints, but it's like she's infected with a logical fallacy disease, and any attempt to rationally examine her case almost forces one to wrongly dismiss her due to a list of fallacies that infect any examination of her claims.

She was hit on by a married man at work? That's genuinely unprofessional. But then she had an affair with a married coworker. It makes it easy to dismiss her on this, even if her complaint is still valid.

She was discriminated against? She received six figure bonuses and huge pay raises for missing a performance review that she then "forgot"! Again, did everybody else get 7 figure bonuses and even bigger raises? Maybe her claim is still valid even if it's easy to lose sight of it in the logical fallacy bait she keeps throwing into the case.

And so on.

Maybe she was lousy at her job and that's why she missed out on opportunities. Maybe she missed out because she's a minority class who was discriminated against.

Maybe she's just an unpleasant person to be around and people didn't invite her to parties, where he easier to get along with peers made good networking connections. Is that discrimination? Not if she wasn't invited for being a whiny bore (I don't know that she is), but it is if she wasn't invited for being a woman or a minority or whatever.

Whatever the case is, it's not entirely clear that she was personally discriminated against, even if the VC firm she was part discriminates in other cases. What is clear is that she definitely played in the same game as many of the people she's now complaining about post-facto, and this soils her arguments.

One of the reasons it's important to try and maintain a good reputation based on strong personal integrity is that if a case like this comes up with you, it's much easier for an arbiter to parse out the bad doings against you from the bad doings you committed.

edit here she is in action https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJp3sTM2oeo

tptacek5• 11 years ago

I downvoted you, because you purported to summarize the case for readers who haven't been following it, and then provided a very misleading summary. Pao's case does not revolve around delayed reviews, or who took notes in meetings. One needn't have an opinion about the merits of Pao's case to have a negative opinion about the merits of this summary.

malvosenior10• 11 years ago

Care to provide some links to what you think the case IS about? I'm addressing points raised in the submitted article and the article I provided a link to. How am I being misleading?

bane4• 11 years ago

What is the case about then? To me at least the summary seemed aligned well with the media coverage I've been following. But I'll admit I haven't had the time to read the source documents.

nyrulez• 11 years ago

What is your concise summary of the biggest accusation that demands justice ? I fail to understand from the bloomberg article as it seems to make all accusations petty and even harmful to her case.

Anechoic• 11 years ago

Pao and Nazre were dating and both married at the time.

Implied in the Ars article, and stated directly in other articles [0,1,2], the affair happened in 2006, but according to Wiki [3] Pao wasn't married until 2007.

[0] http://www.siliconbeat.com/2015/02/17/ellen-pao-vs-kleiner-p...

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/3/8141053/ellen-pao-kleiner-p...

[2] http://www.wired.com/2015/02/ellen-pao-trial-day-two/

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Pao#Personal_life

malvosenior10• 11 years ago

Thank you for this. I'll add it to my comment.

lawnchair_larry• 11 years ago

This is a women in VC story, nothing to do with women in tech.

michaelochurch2• 11 years ago

VCs are the bosses of tech. VCs are the real executives in Silicon Valley and "founders" are upper-mid-level project managers in the world's first postmodern corporation.

michaelochurch2• 11 years ago

If you've been following all of the coverage of this case, Pao isn't coming off well.

In the worst case for her, Ellen Pao turns out to be like Michael Brown: not sympathetic, not a victim, but the case still illustrates a lot of systemic bias and moral failure.

(Not to say that is how it is playing out or will play out.)

I think she probably did have her reputation (internal to the firm) damaged for reasons that constitute gender harassment. I also think that she was passed over and fired not because she was a woman, but because her reputation was damaged and she probably couldn't get much done. The question is how responsible the firm itself is for spotting problems like that and allowing people to clear their own names.

gadders• 11 years ago

The Kleiner Perkins pre-trial brief also implied that the case was launched due to Pao's husband's money problems.

"F. Pao Files A Complaint Full of Unnecessary and Salacious Details

In May 2012, Pao filed this lawsuit alleging gender discrimination, retaliation (for allegedly complaining that Nazre sexually harassed her in 2007), and failure to prevent discrimination. Simultaneously, Pao’s husband, Alphonse “Buddy” Fletcher Jr., filed for bankruptcy on behalf of his hedge fund Fletcher Asset Management (“PAM”) when PAM failed to pay back pension funds that requested reimbursement of their investments.8 The appointed bankruptcy trustee ultimately issued a report stating that PAM had not had a single profitable investment since 2007 (the year Fletcher married Pea) and had committed several improper acts..."

http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/256174...

MollyR• 11 years ago

I know I haven't been keeping up on this hot topic.

But Wow, I didn't know that.

It adds a whole new dimension to this case.

sockshirt• 11 years ago

Stories like this make me feel ambivalent.

Gender inequality being brought to the forefront fairly commonly has definitely forced me to evaluate my own actions and words. It sounds silly (and it is because it's mostly beneficial), but I certainly treat female colleagues differently: I'm much more thoughtful about what I say and do, and try to be as explicit as possible if I think there's any way that my words/actions could be misconstrued. Thoughtful in a way that I'm absolutely not around male colleagues.

And maybe that's totally fine: I really doubt I'll ever regret being more thoughtful. I certainly do this to some extent with people from other cultural backgrounds, so applying it to people from other gender backgrounds (so-to-speak) is probably appropriate.

But it does absolutely setup this "othering" in my mind - I don't see Jennifer as just my coworker, she's my coworker and she's also a woman and I need to be cognizant of how I act and talk around her. I'm careful to think about my words and actions before they materialize, whereas with men I'm much more likely to just act/talk and explain later if necessary. "Asking permission" vs. "Seeking forgiveness".

I don't envy being John Doerr - unless Pao was an absolutely clear frontrunner for becoming a senior partner, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

AndrewWright• 11 years ago

It's a PR victory for KP that the media generally refers to this as the "Ellen Pao Trial" rather than the "Kleiner Perkins Trial"

jusben1369• 11 years ago

"Tracy DiNunzio, chief executive officer of Tradesy, an online fashion site in which Kleiner Perkins has invested, says she was recently told by a male chief executive officer that he doesn’t know how to talk to female colleagues any more and that it’s become too easy to say the wrong thing. The case "may make it harder for men to feel free to give women the kinds of constructive criticism that men receive regularly and that they benefit from," she says."

I found this paragraph to be the most interesting. We're clearly moving from a sexist world to a less sexist world. The transition involves moving norms of what's acceptable and that's creating a lot of angst for both men and women. The above paragraph (and the one before it in the article) represent one common response "Why can't it just be like it was before?" but there's no going backward. Eventually we'll settle at a new equilibrium but Sandy's book and this trial and some other events will be viewed as pivotal moments when they write the textbooks in 20 to 30 years.

The Ellen Pao Trial and Silicon Valley

Related Stories