
The Ellen Pao Trial and Silicon Valley - bko
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-17/the-trial-that-makes-silicon-valley-shudder
======
fweespeech
> 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?

~~~
anaximander
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.

~~~
adevine
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.

------
malvosenior
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...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/ellen-pao-was-resentful-
and-dismissive-kleiner-perkins-lawyers-say/)

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.

~~~
ditonal
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.

~~~
malvosenior
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-...](http://recode.net/2015/03/16/liveblog-mary-meeker-testifies-in-
paokleiner-perkins-case/)

> 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.

~~~
ditonal
Wrong, I do have facts on my side, and we do have a big chunk of the story
because it's being aired out in a high profile court case for those of us
paying attention.

I've been to several VC-funded companies that involved things like excessive
drinking, happy hours as part of the interviews, etc. For some bizarre reason
involving an algorithm called Future Founders that looks for potential
founders, I also got invited to a VC lunch where they talked about these
strategies, ways to effectively outsource, etc. I am going to write a tell-all
about it eventually but I'm still too mid-career for it to be a good idea.

VCs are throwing around a lot of intangibles and "we just can't know for sure"
for why there field is 96% male, and yet the woman who objectively outperforms
them doesn't get promoted. You can easily fact check the sexism I'm talking
about by just looking up top VC firms and scrolling through their list of
partners, and I would also recommend every tech employee look at the gender
makeup of their board of directors, and reading more about this case.

Are you joking about saying her qualifications are debatable? She has an
engineering degree from Princeton, an MBA and JD from Harvard, and the only
thing that prevents her from having a track record of successful investments
is the sexism being demonstrated in this case!

96% male, paying yourselevs $3 million a year but running to Democrats like
Obama and DeBlasio to spend taxpayer money to fill your "talent shortage",
harassing and retaliating against the few female VCs you do have, I do see
sickening behavior, and the reason you can't is because you're a corporate
shill.

------
sockshirt
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.

------
jusben1369
"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.

------
AndrewWright
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"

