Ellen Pao V. Kleiner Perkins Wrap-Up | Hacker News Reader

Ellen Pao V. Kleiner Perkins Wrap-Up

blogs.law.harvard.edu

33 pointstomh12 comments

I don't find this particular lawsuit or issue all that interesting or important, but there is a curious meta-topic surrounding its reception on HN and Reddit. Users on Reddit are claiming that admins (note, employee admins, not mods) are censoring the subject, and I noticed a highly upvoted story about it here on HN the other day vanished as soon as it hit the top spot. Any admins or mods here want to weigh in on why this can't be discussed?

Edit: It seems like this thread is already sliding down the rankings against its popularity. Is this due to people flagging it or has a mod/admin set it to fall faster manually?

One thing I didn't know is that Ellen Pao sued for $144M in punitive damages.

Which is coincidentally the amount to the dollar that her husband is being sued for (and expected to lose) over his Ponzi scheme that bankrupted three Louisiana pension schemes.

Hot topics usually do slide down the rankings pretty quickly, pg and dang mentioned this over the years. You probably remember when bitcoin, NSA and Assange were like every other article on the home page a few years back.

This is a very poorly reasoned article.

Point 1: "Efficient markets will eliminate discrimination." If this were true, we wouldn't have had slavery and segregation in the U.S. up until just 50 years ago. I have no doubt that if Congress hadn't stretched the boundaries of the Constitution with Civil Rights laws, the south would still be segregated today.

Point 2: "Journalists write about the case just because they want to talk about discrimination." Journalists write about the case because of the unrefuted examples of "bad conduct" presented by Pao. I'd never say "we shouldn't invite women because they kill the buzz" even in front of all male coworkers, because it would cost me reputationally. Having a culture where saying things like that isn't costly might not quite cross the line from "immoral" to "illegal" but that doesn't make it okay. The key failing of this article is the author's failure to recognize the distinction between conduct that's wrong and conduct that's illegal. For obvious reasons, we set the line of legality well beyond the point at which conduct becomes wrong.

Point 3: Pao and her husband are involved in lots of lawsuits. I can't even begin to understand where the author is going with this. In half those examples, Pao's husband is the defendant.

Point 4: "Obtaining child-support is 'cash profit.'" This is literally one of the most ridiculous comments I've read on the internet. My wife and I pay $35,000 per year just for 60 hours of childcare per week. 24/7 nannies run six figures. That's the market value of the service of taking care of a kid. If my wife and I got divorced, she'd get about $13,000 a year in child support, even though I make a lot of money. That's not a profit, it's a huge loss. Heck, she'd sue me to keep from having to take full custody.

I think the reason NYTimes columnists sound so stupid is this: to become a NYTimes columnist, you need to impress a whole string of gatekeepers, professors, editors etc. The biggest problem in their world caused by gender bias is these gatekeepers not letting women through. Much of the world works in a similar way, but tech does not, and journalists have not seemed to realize this.

So when critiquing the valley, they look for the gatekeepers, which is why they think - "aha! there must be no female founders because VCs aren't letting them in!"

This baffles SV insiders, who can better understand the relative importance of a VC's opinion. Being rejected? Why that happened to Google 63 times! Unfortunately, this is the point where they conclude that gender bias is a nonsense problem invented by poorly informed arts graduates.

The same thing is happening when journalists complain tech firms don't hire enough women. It would be a very serious problem for women in journalism if their employers were institutionally sexist institution (which I'm sure it is not, of course) but for women in tech, less so. We have far greater "exit rights", due to the liquidity of the market and the relative ease of starting our own companies.

This isn't to say gender bias doesn't exist, or that it isn't a problem, merely that it manifests itself in wildly different ways than a journalist may expect.

As noted in my previous postings (first; second), it was hard to explain why the partners of Kleiner Perkins wanted to make themselves poorer by promoting an unqualified man in favor of a qualified woman. Discrimination of any kind might make sense for a manager at a government agency. [...] But almost anyone should be able to understand that for a VC partnership, indulging in discrimination will personally cost the partners.

I understand being skeptical of the idea that managers in private companies might make irrational decisions that jeopardize their long term profits, but it does happen.

None of the articles about how great this is for the nation mention the fact that it had to cost Kleiner Perkins at least $10 million in legal fees and distraction/time. That would have been enough to fully fund 100 women to get engineering bachelor’s degrees and join the STEM workforce that Barack Obama and the New York Times editorial board say is a good place for people other than themselves (previous posting).

That would be a more convincing argument for me if there was any evidence that KP would have spent that $10+ million to fully fund 100 women to get engineering bachelor’s degrees.

Furthermore, they still have tens of millions which they could do just that with, and haven't done so, and don't have any plans to do so. Why on earth is "they could have done XYZ with that money" an even remotely useful rhetorical tool?

He's using it to frame what he thinks is public perception. In this case, he's putting that number into some kind of perspective more relevant to regular Janes and Joes trying to become engineers. Made sense to use it, or at least I thought so.

Interesting story. The press generally wanted to see a "blatant case of sexual discrimination" , well sorry but things aren't that clear cut. Ellen Pao and her husband are controversial figures, and well known in the silicon valley.

The media,especially liberal media, wanted to build a narrative ,that didnt reflect the reality, so badly. I'm glad they failed. Which proves that they can be as biased and unbalanced as the other side they like to pick on and make fun of. It's now all about ideology no matter the cost or the facts.

It isn't so helpful to concentrate on the specifics of the lawsuit considered here, even if one thinks (as Greenspun seems to do) that it was without merit. In USA we sue too much over everything. Perhaps it's appealing to some to work up a high dudgeon about lawsuits brought by specific demographic groups; our biases always blind us. It's hard to credit, however, that unmerited lawsuits are never filed by white men with conventional morals. I'm not sure that our problem can be solved, but it won't happen while the lawyers can keep us focused on the trees and not the forest.

Greenspun's recent work studying divorce law is more likely to bear fruit, but he risks some nasty inferences when it's juxtaposed with posts like TFA.

Far too many in the media are social justice warriors and simply cannot see outside the box they put themselves in. For them every story with specific actors must always have a set outcome. As such when the results don't fit the narrative they tend to try to put forward the result regardless by associating the event with similar but more convincing ones.

For readers it comes down to finding a set of news sources and through all of them distill it down to some semblance of the truth. Perhaps robo story writers will supplant people for hard news simply because they should be more objective

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