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Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

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Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#501
post #368
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What specific behaviors of Pao would you compare to the constant harassment and mistreatment she experienced at KP? From my recollection, most of the criticism she received was related to poor decisions she made at Reddit, and it has since been revealed by Yishan Wong that she was not actually the person who made those decisions and that she was used as a scapegoat.

I never understood why Pao just didn't say one of the founders (IIRC) fired the AMA woman and that, despite being the CEO, it wasn't her decision. Everyone was angry at Pao for something she didn't do.

[deleted]

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#502
post #357
post #106

It's easy to get hung up on the particulars of Pao's story and get sidetracked into defending or judging her, but I feel that is besides the point. I am more interested in the wider notion of why she wrote this article: to point out that sexism in tech is a thing, and that it shouldn't be. I'm wondering though: is this just about sexism, or is it about professionalism and maturity? Getting hit on by someone higher up…

I can't imagine anything more unprofessional than raving about meeting a washed up porn star and then talking about sex workers in the company of people you are not intimately familiar with. Although you could say it was a 'social' moment on the jet, not a professional meeting (as Pao seems to believe it was) where there should always be much more latitude on conversation topics, it's still very distasteful. I normal…

Not to defend frat culture, but who defines what topics are or are not publicly discussable, and where is this list maintained? Aren't taboos sometimes more harmful than whatever harm the taboo is supposed to prevent?

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#503
post #69

An interesting read. Though, for me, VC in general is not the kind of job that favors people who are nice. When people are rude to you, or try to use you, there's a multitude of ways you can interpret that. For Ellen, it's sexism. What baffled me was that in the opening paragraphs she felt the need to point out that the powerful men were white. For me, it set the tone for the whole article, and painted a clear pictur…

I didn't get that from this article at all. It seems like she made clear points about how she was treated differently from her male colleagues. The story didn't strike me as "people are rude [and Pao has contorted the rudeness into sexism]." All I could think as I read this is that "gee, I would really hate being a woman in that environment." Maybe the high-stakes of VC just means that the amplitude of this entire sy…

I think the implication is that the 'white' part is irrelevant to the sexual harassment she faced and just serves to muddy the waters. Would the treatment she experienced have been any more or less wrong had it been at the hands of non-white men? It's telling that the main harasser in her story, Ajit Nazre, is not white. And yet nowhere in her piece did she mention his ethnicity. It's not a huge leap to assume that the 'white' part of 'white men' is being added for effect and to try to curry sympathy for her cause by conflating two different forms of discrimination when she only experienced one. In fact one of her complaints was that Nazre, another person of Asian descent, was promoted over her. There's no evidence, nor has she ever made the accusation that she was the victim of racial discrimination.

Racism and sexism are two very different wrongs that are often found in the same situations. But they have very different origins, motivations, results and remedies. Therefore we should be careful when we talk about them not to conflate them when only one of them applies to a certain situation.

It is though, IMHO, wrong to call out Pao for blurring this line when so many of these diversity conversations also blur the lines. There are some fundamental differences between racism and sexism that necessitate taking different approaches to each problem and yet people seem so intent on grouping them together under a single 'diversity' label which is, to my mind, counterproductive.

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you can substitute words doesn't invalidate the point. Replace with religion and blacks and whites with Jews and muslims, sure the paragraph can still be written as such, but still doesn't change the original meaning.

Perhaps you'd like to expand on what "the original meaning" was to you? If it wasn't obvious, one of my points was that being good at swimming is just that - it has nothing to do with software engineering. The whole "inherently different" argument is a red-herring if it has no provable bearing on the ability to do the (software engineering) work. edit: my main point though, was that differences in statistical sport a…

The person you replied to already pointed out that the difference has no bearing on their ability to do the work in question, and that, as such, men and women should be treated equally in that area.

>Where those biological differences aren't effective (e.g. typing on a keyboard), then yes, men and women should be treated the same.

You argued against a strawman.

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#505
post #106

It's easy to get hung up on the particulars of Pao's story and get sidetracked into defending or judging her, but I feel that is besides the point. I am more interested in the wider notion of why she wrote this article: to point out that sexism in tech is a thing, and that it shouldn't be. I'm wondering though: is this just about sexism, or is it about professionalism and maturity? Getting hit on by someone higher up…

> In tech people get away with wildly unprofessional behavior as long as "they get stuff done", and personally I never felt that was acceptable. As a decent software developer, if my less talented co-workers, or, god forbid, some HR-type, started telling me constantly about how I needed to be more "professional", I would hand in my resignation the next day and go somewhere that didn't absolutely suck to work.

"...if my less talented co-workers..."

What about if it's your more talented co-workers?

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be difficult to laugh at an idea when you see widespread evidence of it from multiple sources on a regular basis, unfortunately.

Sure, yes, I agree. That doesn't mean the correct course of action is to force societies hand to accommodate someone's hurt feelings . I argue the correct course of action is for people to develop resilience and emotional maturity .

We're not trying to force society's hand to accommodate people's hurt feelings - we're trying to force society's hand to change incorrect and dangerous/oppressive ideas that it holds, such as that women are inherently unfit for STEM work.

Laughing them off doesn't get anywhere - these beliefs are not a one-off thing, as much as we wish they were - and complaining about these ideas and the prevalence of them gets seen by people like yourself as "having hurt feelings".

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#507
post #106

It's easy to get hung up on the particulars of Pao's story and get sidetracked into defending or judging her, but I feel that is besides the point. I am more interested in the wider notion of why she wrote this article: to point out that sexism in tech is a thing, and that it shouldn't be. I'm wondering though: is this just about sexism, or is it about professionalism and maturity? Getting hit on by someone higher up…

She couldn't prove sexism in court. Twice now. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pao_v._Kleiner_Perkins Why would you defend false allegations by Pao? They hurt women that actually do experience it. They also give more evidence to the fact that women do use the system to get rich quick by suing in hopes of getting a massive settlement. She should be condemned and her claims should not be used to demonstrate sexism, whi…

This crosses into personal attack. You don't have anything like the basis you would need to credibly post such inflammatory claims, so this comment breaks the HN guidelines. We ban accounts that do this, and I'm sorry to say you've done it repeatedly in the past. Please fix this if you want to continue commenting here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#508
post #142

Please quote a part of the Damore original memo where he explained women were inferior (except, maybe, in numbers as far as the computer science field is concerned)?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15063187 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t

#509

Men often have to deal with loads of shit at work also, but if you are a straight white man you don't have a handy discrimination card to play.

Ideological flamebait is indistinguishable from trolling. Please do not post like this to HN.

Edit: It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do this, so please stop doing it. It's not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15062943 and marked it off-topic.

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