The Ellen Pao Trial and Silicon Valley
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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?
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.
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.
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.
Coworkers don't need a license, because it's not illegal to make a pass at a coworker.
> you obviously shouldn't be hitting on people at work.
"Hitting on" is a crude way to describe buying a gift. Is love now banned at work?
Drinks with the team? Sure, but I leave after one. Gifts to a coworker and an invitation to dinner? Not a chance. It's just too unpredictable no matter what you mean by it. I respect my coworkers enough not to force them into ambiguity with me as a person. Personal relationships have so many opportunities to go south. Why would I complicate my workplace?
Is that unfair? Maybe. I'm not there to make friends. Silicon Valley is pretty bad at this in general. The last thing I want to do on a weekend anyway is see the same people I see all week and do something social, and have to pretend that business stays at the office.
You should try it. I haven't been burnt out for years, like I was when I left work only to go socialize with the same people. It was like living in Groundhog Day. The startups that force this culture on its employees are part of the problem. I do not devote my life to a company. I'm sorry.
I never said anything about legality. Ethics should not strictly be a reflection of laws, laws should be a reflection of ethics. Using laws as the only things that guide your ethical decisions works fine if you want to be a major asshole to people, but not if you want to exist in a healthy community.
> "Hitting on" is a crude way to describe buying a gift. Is love now banned at work?
This isn't about "love" being "banned" at work or anything, this is about what constitutes appropriate behavior. You should try to not make things uncomfortable for others. The immediate personal cost you incur when you work to make a group of people less uncomfortable is tiny compared to the costs that they have to deal with from society handing them a raw deal, and it can help a lot.
Actually, the argument is "She slept with someone else, so why shouldn't I be allowed to see if she's interested in sleeping with me?"
Finding out if she's interested in sleeping with you is a privileged relationship. You don't just find that out from random coworkers. The "privileged relationship" I was referring to was one where you get to find that sort of thing out, not one where you automatically get to sleep with them.
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.
I'm sure Pao's attorneys are arguing it is a part of a larger hostile work environment. But itself isn't sexual harassment.
Mentoring and being nice to a woman is very, very different than flirting with her. Implying they are the same is gross.
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.
There are plenty of articles that agree the gift was given on Valentine's Day?
The problem is the choice of gift on Valentines and the fact the author of the article basically equated buying erotic poetry with being "nice and mentoring".
"Hitting on a woman" - Doing nice things and inviting her to be alone with you on a day dedicated to romance.
The invitation to have dinner may have happened anytime.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I'd trade what I'm getting paid right now to take on what sounds like a far easier job that pays quite a bit more in a bad year than what I make in a great year.
But qualifications don't get you into these kinds of clubs, connections and pedigree do.
You keep saying I'm uninformed but you've not provided any information to this discussion. Please do! I want to know more.
Saying "I'm right, but I refuse to prove it!" doesn't get you much.
I don't see how that's helpful. I don't know what you're suggesting we do either. You don't want to supply facts because they'll be "retcon"-ed? That's a new one.
Pao and her supervisor hooked up. She stopped fucking him and he retaliated (illegal). She complained to the head of the firm and he didn't stop the retaliation (also illegal).
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...
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.
"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...
But Wow, I didn't know that.
It adds a whole new dimension to this case.
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.
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.