I was sad to see that Ellen Pao lost her case of gender discrimination against the Venture Capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The very existence of the lawsuit will have had some effect on Silicon Valley, but a win would have done much more to shake up a male dominated tech industry.
I wasn’t on the jury, so can’t speak to the details of the case, but I do know the deck is stacked against women in these situations. The jury is being asked to decide if someone was fired for incompetence or fired because of the firm’s culture and biases. Unfortunately there’s little chance that a randomly selected jury can come to an independent informed decision on the issue of competence in a VC firm. I suspect even a carefully chosen panel of technology experts would struggle on that. Instead they’re forced to use the reviews, notes and opinions from the firm itself, and that’s where the deck is stacked.
I’ve covered the double standards for women working in tech in the past, along with the more general issue of attitudes to forceful women. Characteristics that get a man promoted – aggressive, pushy, argumentative – will count against a woman. Women who are laid back lack initiative, where women who forceful are difficult to work with. Those biases end up in emails and performance reviews. The data that the jury is forced to use to decide competence is coming from a tainted source – the very firm that’s in the dock. So unless it’s a horribly egregious example of discrimination, then the biases of male bosses and co-workers continue to function as part of the trial evidence. I think this Jezebel article does a pretty good job of covering the issue.
I sadly don’t have any answer to this problem, other than raising awareness of it. I’ll leave you with a picture of a very successful independent businesses woman. She’s created her own media empire based on the latest technical innovations. Plus, she has an excellent T-shirt on. This is of course the one and only Mistress T.
Good on you for raising awareness, I was disappointed by that verdict too. I’m not sure how we’re supposed to get a fair verdict from a jury that could easily be just as biased as the who decided to fire Ellen Pao. Even an all female jury could easily convince themselves she deserved to be fired because that’s less scary than admitting you can be screwed over at any time just because you’re a woman and there’s next to nothing you can do about it.
I’ve no idea how you’d get a fair trial in these kind of situations. Managing people is inherently a fuzzy and ambiguous process, and I think in the face of uncertainty people have a natural bias to the status quo.
-paltego
While the issue of discrimination is important, many would agree rallying behind Ellen Pao is a bad idea. Following the trial, it is clear that the problem is that she’s a narcissist and the reason she got fired was because she was difficult to work with. She’s also underhanded and actively tried to sabotage her colleagues. Her testimony in the trial showed that she mindset is when things don’t work out it’s because of her gender.
The lawsuit is also a calculated one because if she was proving a point, she could have filed a 1 dollar lawsuit. Instead, she’s asking for around 140 million, which conveniently is linked to her spouse who is a known frivolous litigator who has previously filed race based lawsuits, and is currently caught in a ponzi-scheme with a 140 million hole to fill.
The Ellen Pao lawsuit has done a major disservice for woman because KP has one of the best male – female ratio in the VP industry, and Ellen’s lawsuit has now made everyone think twice about hiring a woman because of the potential risk in dismissing her.
Did I also mention KP offered her a garden leave on around 30k per month, and she went directly to KPs client whinging about her dismissal and hence forcing KP to directly fire her?
Do you work for KP? Your comments and defense of their m/f ration (really bad as opposed to the industry wide really really bad) makes me wonder. It’s an odd thing to raise.
Most of your other points are quite frankly ridiculous. If she thinks she has been discriminated against and lost out on millions of dollars, why the hell should she file a $1 lawsuit? She should drag her personal life through the mud, get her name in all the papers for $1? What the hell would be the point of that? And why would that be fair if she won?
The tired old argument about women who raise issues making it harder for other women is equally daft. By your logic that’d be true if she won or lost. So in fact the only thing women should do, no matter what discrimination they suffer, is to shut up and smile about it. Otherwise they’ll just be discouraging men from hiring women.
The rest of your comments are either irrelevant (who cares who she’s married to) or play exactly into my point in the post (the data about her work behavior comes from the people who she claimed were discriminating against her).
I don’t know the truth of what happened. Nobody truly does. But attitudes like yours are a major part of the problem women face in these situations.
-paltego