Ellen Pao: My lawsuit failed. Others won’t • Hacker News Board

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

#531

Post by moomin » Mon, Aug 21, 2017, 11:02 PM UTC

Boothroid wrote: post #171

arkitaip wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blaming Soros for everything that's wrong in the world is conspiracy theory paranoia.

And this isn't? 'The existence of the gamergate/alt-right/etcetera troll army isn't really in dispute. Equally it's well known that actors foreign and domestic have been pushing these viewpoints with actual cash.'

So, you've never heard of Nimble America? Or the Internet Research Agency? Or the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment?

But yeah, all of these things are fake news. Nowhere near as reliable of 4chan or KIA.

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

#532

Post by slackstation » Mon, Aug 21, 2017, 11:10 PM UTC

barsonme wrote: post #477

mc32 wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What struck me was that the same Jenna Jemison obsessed CEO was one of the most ardent spokespersons for "Lean In". As someone once said, "some of the most vocal feminist men are some of the creepiest". It's as if it's their red herring for behaving badly. Going from her quotes, it's as if they went out of their way to be obnoxious.

Another interesting anecdote is Kai Cole (Joss Wheadon's ex-wife): http://www.thewrap.com/joss-whedon-feminist-hypocrite-infide...

That is such a strange article. It shackles Joss Wheadon with this additional moral failing for cheating on his wife as if his feminist ideal should stop him from falling for the trappings that all rich powerful people go through.

Somehow because he has particular views of the equality of men and women, it should give him an above average amount of will power to stop himself from temptation?

Feminism is a political stance not a moral super-power. The great majority of people with access to something will not hold themselves back. Men in positions of power will have women throwing themselves at them. Most men will succumb to that temptation the same way the majority of the population with access to food will eventually succumb to the temptation to overeat.

At some point almost all people will get fat as they get comfortable and older. From all accounts I've heard, nearly all professional atheletes and musicans cheat. If you had beautiful women throwing themselves at you, you would probably succumb to it eventually. Most men do. Women's sex drive and biochemistry is different and most attractive women have had men throwing themselves (or at least have 2nd hand experience through a friend) and thus it isn't equivalent. Most women don't know what it's like to have what you were chasing your whole life, chasing you. It's like being a lion and have gazelles trying to leap into your mouth all the time.

When you add the fact that his casting someone (and he was known for casting relatively unknown actors) could change the course of their entire career and thus life, and most of those who could benefit the most are literally a self-selected group of the most beautiful women in the world, it's no wonder why he cheated.

So, to take all of that and heap some kinda extra moral failure on him is unfair. If she cheated, it wouldn't be some failure of her feminist stance. She would just be someone who cheated.

It was merely a betrayal of a loved one but, doesn't mean that all of a sudden he hates women because he cheated.

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

#533

Post by tomxor » Mon, Aug 21, 2017, 11:47 PM UTC

erikpukinskis wrote: post #491

tomxor wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Pao's story is important to tell, but she lacks the personal credibility for people to care ^This, because it matters, reverse the scenario if you like, and make it a man... It's very difficult to care about any type of discrimination when the person discriminated against is unpleasant to say the least. This is not hate, stop the mad flagging and form an argument!

It's not OK to harass unpleasant people.

pls.. don't strawman me, i did not say it's ok to harass unpleasant people. If you can't form an argument don't bother commenting.

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

#534

Post by itsdrewmiller » Tue, Aug 22, 2017, 1:44 AM UTC

new299 wrote: post #140

_Codemonkeyism wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your "how utilitarian the hiring process is" but be aware that this starts earlier. As a CTO I was wondering how to hire more women for more diversity [1] because not enough women applied. After going to girls camps, meetups, talking to women with not much success (not due to the women), I asked some female engineers - especially one from Soundcloud, thanks! They told me my job ad is already wrong. This…

Can you give a more explicit example of how the job Ad should look? I don't quite understand.

https://textio.com/ is basically dedicated to this problem and has a solid blog.

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

#535

Post by zebraflask » Tue, Aug 22, 2017, 2:21 AM UTC

gnicholas wrote: post #516

zebraflask wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, that's a surprising move. The "we have nothing to hide, we'll give you everything" approach to discovery can end up with exactly what happened, if the other side likes to use war of attrition and pressure tactics: deposition questions, and related lines of inquiry, that have no relevance to the issues. They're engaged in solely to wear out and dishearten the producing party. You'd think her counsel would have kn…

> How hard would it have been to run a few keyword searches and get some paralegals or junior associates to filter out the irrelevant material? It's actually trickier than it seems, and the penalties for under-inclusion can be harsh. Even if you make a good faith/reasonable effor, if you accidentally don't include everything that you're supposed to, you can be sanctioned. So if you do a keyword search for a word that…

I get what you're saying, but in my experience, the risk of sanctions for a good faith production with a few things overlooked is minimal to none. If the other side notices and brings it up (assuming nothing else preventing production), you just give it to them. Problem solved. No judge is going to impose sanctions for essentially doing what the rules of discovery tell you to do.

In Pao's case, it comes across as allowing the other side all kinds of opportunities to go fishing for irrelevant tangents, embarrassing material, overly-personal material, etc., with an almost passive endorsement of that tactic. She wrote that some of this stuff included attorney-client communications! That's terrible. And one of them was a therapy record? Doesn't that sound like a HIPAA issue?

You'd think that effective counsel would try to define the scope of the evidence and the boundaries of the issues on the table every chance they could. A well-thought out document production is one of the cheapest and easiest ways of doing that.

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

#536

Post by ImSkeptical » Tue, Aug 22, 2017, 2:21 AM UTC

strken wrote: post #183

Articles like this really make me aware that men and women like Ellen Pao and her former partners live in a separate parallel world: three degrees, $10 million golden parachutes, private jet flights to ski resorts, affairs with a creepy married co-worker in Germany, machismo-driven muscling for VC connections, bisexual finance wizards who kickstart an Ivy-League LGBT program, dominance games over which chair an exec…

I think it says something about human nature that she was equally resentful of missing the ski trip and the cookie.

The story is so far outside of my ken I have trouble believing it. And yet, like you say, this is a completely different world from mine - maybe people really do act like this.

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

#537

Post by Powerofmene » Tue, Aug 22, 2017, 2:37 AM UTC

ImSkeptical wrote: post #536

strken wrote: post #183

Articles like this really make me aware that men and women like Ellen Pao and her former partners live in a separate parallel world: three degrees, $10 million golden parachutes, private jet flights to ski resorts, affairs with a creepy married co-worker in Germany, machismo-driven muscling for VC connections, bisexual finance wizards who kickstart an Ivy-League LGBT program, dominance games over which chair an exec…

I think it says something about human nature that she was equally resentful of missing the ski trip and the cookie. The story is so far outside of my ken I have trouble believing it. And yet, like you say, this is a completely different world from mine - maybe people really do act like this.

>I think it says something about human nature that she was equally resentful of missing the ski trip and the cookie

She was not upset about missing a ski trip or a cookie. She was pointing out that women are excluded in things big and small in the VC world of KP and the pettiness of the men she worked with in passing a plate of cookies and bypassing the women. The gesture while petty spoke volumes as I would Imagine was the intent. The same could be said of the excuse of why women were excluded from the ski trip. If the company spent that much money to fly everyone out, do you really believe that KP could not afford accommodations for the women? Certainly they could. It was a passive aggressive way to say, "the women are not welcome on the ski trip" without having to say it directly. The foolish games that children play.

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

#538

Post by Natsu » Tue, Aug 22, 2017, 2:48 AM UTC

pervycreeper wrote: post #453

Natsu wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I mean, that's kind of the question, isn't it? She's sharing a lot of personal anecdotes after losing on her claims about those in court. I do not know what happened or what people actually said, but I won't take the illogical step of inferring things about this case from the outcome of other cases or vice versa and I disliked the fact that this is a lot of scandalous, unverifiable anecdotes that she was not ab…

No judgement from me on the ultimate truth or falsity of her claim. My only point is that the idea that a PR firm would engage in astroturfing has enough plausibility not to be dismissed as a conspiracy theory out of hand, since such things do actually happen. Other contextual factors certainly do bear on the overall credibility of the claim, but taken in isolation, it is not an absurdity, as the parent comment seems…

It's a bit ambiguous as to how to read that. I'm going to assume that you mean that you're setting a non-zero prior probability, which is reasonable enough. However, that's currently multiplied by zero evidence as far as I've seen.

Otherwise confirmation bias will simply take over and lead us astray. I mean, it's not exactly falsifiable. I could just as well say that most of the people I disagree with are actually just Perl scripts, not real people.

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

#539

Post by Powerofmene » Tue, Aug 22, 2017, 2:52 AM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #502

dmix wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The law does not provide a list of subjects that you can or cannot discuss. The law assumes that you can understand the harassment law and make reasonable decisions regarding appropriate subjects and or statements. If it is necessary to make a list then it would be the responsibility of the employer to make the list and distribute it and hope that such list is all inclusive.

As far as where information is maintained, as I said, the Cod of Federal Regulation states the law for each of us to refer to. It can be found on the US EEOC website. In short, the following is the law:

Harassment Harassment is a form of employment discrimination that violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, (ADEA), and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, (ADA).

Harassment is unwelcome conduct that is based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information. Harassment becomes unlawful where 1) enduring the offensive conduct becomes a condition of continued employment, or 2) the conduct is severe or pervasive enough to create a work environment that a reasonable person would consider intimidating, hostile, or abusive. Anti-discrimination laws also prohibit harassment against individuals in retaliation for filing a discrimination charge, testifying, or participating in any way in an investigation, proceeding, or lawsuit under these laws; or opposing employment practices that they reasonably believe discriminate against individuals, in violation of these laws.

Petty slights, annoyances, and isolated incidents (unless extremely serious) will not rise to the level of illegality. To be unlawful, the conduct must create a work environment that would be intimidating, hostile, or offensive to reasonable people.

Offensive conduct may include, but is not limited to, offensive jokes, slurs, epithets or name calling, physical assaults or threats, intimidation, ridicule or mockery, insults or put-downs, offensive objects or pictures, and interference with work performance. Harassment can occur in a variety of circumstances, including, but not limited to, the following:

The harasser can be the victim's supervisor, a supervisor in another area, an agent of the employer, a co-worker, or a non-employee.

The victim does not have to be the person harassed, but can be anyone affected by the offensive conduct.

Unlawful harassment may occur without economic injury to, or discharge of, the victim.

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

#540

Post by Powerofmene » Tue, Aug 22, 2017, 2:58 AM UTC

xhedley wrote: post #517

nitrogen wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You can define it by imagining a male co-worker in a meeting with your mother/sister/daughter/other female relative/female friend. Are you comfortable with your male co-worker discussing pornography and sex work in that level of detail with her? If not sure, ask your mother/sister/daughter/other female relative/female friend. If you don't have a female relative or friend to ask - random HN user and Ellen Pao advise y…

At a government training, I once had a harassment trainer explain it very similarly. If you would not say it to your grandmother, mother, sister or daughter, do not say it. If you would not want someone saying, sharing explicit details or even joking about personal relations with your grandmother, mother, sister or daughter the same thing that you are saying about a coworker or even a stranger then do not say it. It is not appropriate. It is illegal and it will have a profound and negative impact on your career.