Before you downvote, please provide factual evidence and I will gladly update this comment.
1. You said "good for Kleiner". Whether you agree or not, KPCB is massive firm now asking threatening a $1MM suit against an individual who had good faith claims and that just feels really icky to be called "good". I'm fully aware that the burden of proof for damages rests with the plaintiff and she failed that claim, however this is nowhere near the frivolous lawsuit standard. I am going to also reject your plea for factual evidence because I'm not doing your research for you in this instance, but read over some summary judgements in frivolous lawsuit claims that have been ruled in the plaintiffs favor and compare it to the facts of this case.
2. You asked not to be downvoted. Pleas w/r/t voting do not belong on vote based social networks and forums. They are purely manipulative.
Why should KPCB be any different in trying to recover money from a court case they won on every count? Just because they have $X amount of money more than you or I?
Depending on what you mean by "personally sued", this is one of the main reasons limited liability corporations exist: So the shareholders aren't personally responsible for lawsuits the company gets involved in. This is where "corporate personhood" comes from, the idea that, in some limited circumstances, corporations can function as people to make legal proceedings possible.
Suing a company to redress a grievance is feasible. The company has an office, assets, and so on. Trying to track down and sue everyone who has or had a financial stake in the company is not feasible, and if it were, companies would cease to exist because nobody could stomach the risk of all of their personal assets being up for grabs if a lawsuit doesn't go their way.
Edit: The question was sincere, and I can't think of any reason for which a corporation of means should be in some way more responsible for frivolous lawsuits than one of lesser means, or of an individual.
The logical outcome, to me, seems to be that if there were some inequal burden in the eyes of the law for "wealthy companies" that it would invite frivolous lawsuits on the grounds that suing wealthy companies is now a zero risk endeavor.
If I, as an individual, could sue Google with zero fear of retaliation, I can't see why I wouldn't, on the off chance that I might land a pretty large windfall, if I were to win.
Because this was not a criminal trial and therefore the judgement does not determine "guilt" or "innocence?"
Because monied interests always have more power whether they are the plaintiff or the defendant in a case?
You are correct that the proper term for a civil case is "not responsible" but frankly that sounds silly to non-lawyers, as it's too similar to "irresponsible."
That makes it really hard for me to believe she was a victim of anything but her own imagination.
There were a lot of people who decided Kleiner looked bad based purely on the word of Ellen Pao.
Verbal recollections are not, however, evidence.
How do you know this?
What would hard evidence even be for this type of case? Is there going to be an e-mail between partners saying "we should not promote Ellen because she's a woman"?
Did Ellen Pao prove her case conclusively? I think not. Was it clear that there were plenty of issues going on at the time that Kleiner could've handled a lot better? I think so.
Are we really going to start to sue over disillusionment?
And yes, if you do everything your employer asks of you and then some, you should be rewarded. What is this world coming to when doing so is considered "average"?
You probably should, but the reality of a capitalistic system is you probably won't.
I have a lot of friends who did everything they were told would get them good jobs, a stable pay, money to have a house, a vacation... but they have nothing. Not to discredit Pao, but I sometimes just laugh at people lamenting about not getting their millions whilst I'm sitting here, drinking with my suicidal buddy who's lamenting about not being able to land a job, after having submitted his resume to over a hundred places.
How about if they were both the same gender?
Selection of a candidate for a position is based on the candidate's performance in their current role rather than on abilities relevant to the intended role. Thus, employees only stop being promoted once they can no longer perform effectively, and "managers rise to the level of their incompetence."
There's a reason why so many companies put a lot of emphasis on "culture fit".
People had trouble working with her possibly after she brought up issues of sexual harassment and discrimination, but there's actually something under the law to protect her from this, anti-retaliation laws, which she tried to sue Kleiner over and lost, but that part of the case definitely seemed like there was some merit to although possibly not enough to meet a preponderance of the evidence.
So you can't assume just because someone isn't dismissed quickly that they automatically were a good hire. I've seen plenty of bad hires kept around because people were unable to grok why this person was difficult. They give them lots of second chances and it took time before everyone finally gave up. I'm not saying that's what happened here, what I am saying is you can't jump to a conclusion that because someone wasn't fired that means they were a good fit.
what alternative did they have? A lawsuit "they gave me bad performance/fired me because i'm a woman"? A lawsuit which they would lose with much higher probability and much higher damages. They could only wait until she leaves on her own.
>People had trouble working with her possibly after she brought up issues of sexual harassment and discrimination
People had trouble working with her possibly because she is a total jerk - she complained that the assistant of her colleague was sending brain scans of dying from cancer mother from office.
Wrt. promotion - promotion isn't something employee is entitled to. If you think company doesn't value you enough - get an offer at other place and you will immediately see how much your company really values you. Did Kleiner tried to keep her when she was leaving? Seems like they didn't. Why? Because she is a woman?
Now at Reddit she installed "no negotiation" hiring policy. She seems to be unaware that in case of good employees it isn't the prospective employee who negotiates, it really his current employer who doesn't want the employee to leave. Probably her former employers has always just let her leave easy, without counters :)
Before she initiated the lawsuit, she did not know what would be found in discovery. From her standpoint at the time, a suspicion of gender discrimination was valid. She hoped to find a "smoking gun" in discovery.
There was no smoking gun, and she was far from a sympathetic or innocent plaintiff (the affair with Mr. Nazre really killed her) so she lost.
Every bit of testimony from a Kleiner employee should be thrown out, at least on subjective matters like job performance. A person who is employed by one party or the other cannot possibly be expected to give a valid representation. No one's going to testify against someone who can end his career inside of a couple months (obviously with phony performance reviews, because no employer will admit to firing someone over inconvenient testimony).
Do I think that the jury made the right call? Sadly, I'd say "yes". I think that she did end up on the wrong side of an exclusionary culture (that may have been for reasons other than her gender; you never know if it's ethnicity or gender or health or age, the last of which can cut against young or old depending on the group) and was therefore evaluated inaccurately and unfairly. She failed to prove it, though. It would have been very different if discovery had brought forward a smoking gun that proves gendered discrimination... which didn't happen, but there's no way she could have possibly known that.
This is the thing about discrimination that most HN posters don't get. It's not like the people who are guilty of it (and there are many, along age and gender and ethnic and class lines) make it obvious. They don't. It's a silent crime. Most of the time, the victims have no idea that it is happening. They might have suspicions, but it's hard as hell to prove. Ellen Pao tried to do so and came close, but ultimately failed in proving anything conclusive.
The fact that they did not find any such "smoking gun" after all that legal discovery makes me believe that they are honest, as that means they couldn't find anything at all after a lot of searching.
> Making claims one is unable to substantiate and dragging a case through discovery is normally considered an abuse of the legal system
A judge can decide to kill said "fishing expedition" too. It's not like these fishing expeditions just "happen" and once initiated are unstoppable. If it was ludicrous, then the judge should have denied it.
The fact that this got shut out so quickly simply points to the fact that there was essentially nothing to substantiate Pao's legal claims.
The purpose of discovery in these cases is that you don't know what has been said about you. That's why, if you think you might be a victim of discrimination, you often have to sue in order to get that information.
In her particular case, she found no proof. That said, she couldn't have possibly known before the discovery process that it wouldn't be there.
If she were sifting through the files to find breaches of irrelevant, outdated laws and regulations, that'd be a fishing expedition. In this case, the communications that were discovered were relevant to her (justified, because even though she wasn't able to prove gender discrimination, she did prove that, except for John Doerr, they were unprofessional and horrible toward her) grievance.