Ellen Pao Is 'a Rosa Parks' for Women in Silicon Valley

> “Ellen’s story is the exact same as everyone else's, which is the story of a club that is not open to women,” said Rebecca Eisenberg

If Ellen's story is in fact the exact same as everyone else's, and if a jury of unbiased people (half men and half women, not that it should matter) found that there was not discrimination against Ellen, then that seems to argue against the popular narrative of everpresent sexism.

I'm not saying, and no one should, that sexism doesn't exist in tech. It does in some places. The questions are how common it is, where, and what we can do. But one of the sad things about sexism is that women find themselves thinking things like "did I lose that promotion because of sexism?" and they can't know for certain. This case shows that yes, it's sad and unfair that you can't tell, but sometimes things look like discrimination to you, but an objective eye from outside concludes that it just looked that way. Again, this isn't fair, but that's just how it is.

Ellen's story might be a common one, but that is a story in which the sexism is sometimes real and sometimes not. The verdict brings us no closer to knowing how often sexism is real in tech. It does show us that the narrative about sexism in tech is a big leap to an unproven conclusion.