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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

#511

Post by dzink »

Nursie wrote: post #272
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…

Yeah, that really struck me as well. I've been in tech for close to 20 years now. I get paid pretty well compared to the national average pay, and globally speaking it's off the charts. But the figures and activities mentioned there are completely alien to me. This is the (a?) world of high finance and I can't relate to it. I've seen a lot of casual and systemic sexism in the tech industry, in the trenches and at the…

> I just don't recognise the business painted here to be "tech"

VC Cash influences power dynamics between tech companies very very heavily. If you're not in SV and chose to get funding elsewhere and are successful, safe bet that an SV competitor of yours will get better funding than you and eat up some of your potential market size. Each big firm will fund one top competitor in the space and let them duke it out, so how long will you last without their funding? Odds are high there are many companies with diverse founders and superior products who lost the battle to a competitor funded by one of these VCs. If top VC firms don't have strong female and diverse partners, they don't see the value in businesses that serve female and diverse markets as well.

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

#512

Post by samstave »

aianus wrote: post #487
sangnoir wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter devils advocate - let me remap what you're saying to race: >> racism in tech is a thing, and that it shouldn't be. >To play devils advocate, racism is a thing everywhere. In some cases, there are good biological reasons why blacks and whites are treated differently, e.g. basketball (mostly blacks) versus swimming (mostly whites ) If the above doesn't sound insane to you, I don't know what to tell you.

White men represent only 23.3% of NBA players despite white people representing 63% of the greater population of the US. Clearly this is evidence of systemic discrimination against whites and the NBA needs to step up their diversity efforts to balance it out. In addition, blacks need to rein in their offensive and exclusionary 'hip-hop' culture in the NBA as it is making whites uncomfortable and reluctant to join or…

it would be interesting to actually look at various aspects of human history and the touted expert contributors to various fields...

We, on HN, are keenly aware of Turing's contributions - the fact that he was gay has literally no bearing on our appreciation of his contributions;

Wifi as you know it (frequency hopping) was invented by a female

Many people with many contributions to the advancement of modern civilization were... human!!!!

Now, if we really want to be inclusionary - who are the undersung animals? The jelly fish, lab rats, telomeres of the immortal, Pavlov's dogs?

This whole argument is quite stupid (stupid that it is even an argument)

Fighting over merits is bullshit; hey Sur Gregor Clegane, squeeze through that doggy door. Hey Gary Coleman, bring me that 500 pound axel!

Physicality surely has its pigeon holes, mental capabilities do as well: clearly gender does not.

Brianne of Tarth could dig a bigger ditch than theon or Tyrion...

The sad thing is that Google has built itself on an interview process of supposed meritocracy - and witha single memo exposed themselves as not being such... wage fixing etc...

Human judgement is the real culprit. Bias. Where is it learned, innate or developed? How do personal, professional,psychological, physiological or familial bias occur and present?

Well, they clearly just present all around you! They are everywhere - so how to judge another?

The problem with the issue at hand is that we are using professional/physiological situations to judge psychological/other factors...

Bias silos exist. I'll defer my time to the gentleman with better articulation ability than I.

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

#513

Post by Bartweiss »

mcguire wrote: post #416
Nursie wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that really struck me as well. I've been in tech for close to 20 years now. I get paid pretty well compared to the national average pay, and globally speaking it's off the charts. But the figures and activities mentioned there are completely alien to me. This is the (a?) world of high finance and I can't relate to it. I've seen a lot of casual and systemic sexism in the tech industry, in the trenches and at the…

" I just don't recognise the business painted here to be "tech". " Perhaps. But those VCs and CEOs and COOs are your bosses. Just as engineering cannot be divorced from the effects of what is built,"tech" is hard to separate from it's own environment. And it appears that the same antics continue down the stack.

> But those VCs and CEOs and COOs are your bosses.

No, they aren't. I don't mean to be hostile here, but I object strongly to the implicit assumption that 'tech' means "heavily Sandhill-funded software companies operating in the Valley".

I've worked at several software companies, some good, some bad. But I, like a very large portion of American 'tech' workers or even 'CS-degree bearing programmers', have never actually worked for a Silicon Valley company, much less one with major VC financing, much less one where VC culture has shaped everyone else's environment.

That's not to deny that there can be a very real issue here. But as an example, banking has similar serious issues at the top, and I wouldn't assume that every realtor's office, even ones ultimately tied to Merrill Lynch, had the same issues. Even if a realtor did have issues with sexism and discrimination, I think it would be unreasonable to assume that they came from what happened at the top carrying 'down the stack'.

I think it does a real disservice to 'tech' in general to understand it entirely in light of people like Travis Kalanick and Justin Caldbeck. I think it even does a disservice to efforts to fight sexism and harassment; the behavior of the richest and most powerful people in tech seems to have more in common with the rich and powerful of other industries than the rank-and-file of tech.

And I worry that this concept of trickle-down misbehavior will do exactly what the top comment points out - obscure everyday issues and opportunities in favor of a focus on a small group that's behaving quite differently, and can't be easily improved.

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

#514

Post by natecavanaugh »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #175
natecavanaugh wrote: post #170

I totally agree sexism is a thing, not just in Silicon Valley, but in every strata of our society. And I'm saying this not just as a life long conservative, but also as someone who has had many strong women in his life who have absorbed a ton of crap simply because they are women, including my mother, grandmother and basically almost every woman I've ever met. I don't like blaming of societal issues for a person's ac…

the same gender who bewilderingly sends dick pics to strangers, talks crudely about women behind their backs, and views them as a means to a physical end, maybe we don't see how we interact with women or at least admit that many of our gender demean women in ways that equates to bullying in one form or another. Whoah. The fact that some of the 3.5 billion people that share the same sex as myself engage in this lewd b…

Did I claim that someone else's behavior limits your neutrality? Or that it somehow invalidates your views?

Also, did I say anywhere that stereotyping was bad in and of itself?

In fact, here is what I did say:

maybe we don't see how we interact with women or at least admit that many of our gender demean women in ways that equates to bullying in one form or another.

Not sure what that has to do with you or your views, but you seem to be defensive simply because I stated a generalization.

And yeah, I stereotype and prejudge all of the time. However, in any power position I may hold, I need to correct for it internally to make sure that instead of trying to confirm my biases, I'm actually being fair and respectful to the other party. And I think this should be done regardless of the genders involved.

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

#515

Post by FireBeyond »

zebraflask wrote: post #392
abtinf wrote: post #344

"I didn’t have time to go through all my emails to figure out which ones to give Kleiner, so during the discovery process we gave them practically everything, some 700,000 emails — most of which we could have legally withheld. ... During depositions, they brought up everything from my nanny’s contract to an exercise I’d done in therapy where I listed resentments. Emails to friends, emails to my husband, emails to oth…

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…

Pretty much exactly this.

Sort by "From" and thread conversations. Far easier than by date.

As an executive, Pao just deciding that this was acceptable, either at the behest of her counsel, or with their approval, demonstrates "poor risk management behavior" that I wouldn't want in any company executive.

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

#516

Post by gnicholas »

zebraflask wrote: post #392
abtinf wrote: post #344

"I didn’t have time to go through all my emails to figure out which ones to give Kleiner, so during the discovery process we gave them practically everything, some 700,000 emails — most of which we could have legally withheld. ... During depositions, they brought up everything from my nanny’s contract to an exercise I’d done in therapy where I listed resentments. Emails to friends, emails to my husband, emails to oth…

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 seems innocuous/personal (so that you can exclude those emails) and it turns out you accidentally excluded some emails you were supposed to include (because you didn't have doc reviewers actually read every email that the search returned), you can get in trouble.

And having doc reviewers go through hundreds of thousands of emails could cost $50k or more. How much would depend on how complex the discovery request is.

If they just said "send us emails where you talk about John Doerr", that's easy. If they say "send us emails where you talk about JD, the firm, your mental health, or sexism in SV", that becomes much more difficult/expensive.

Under the circumstances, it is not appropriate to fault her lawyers for the decision not to do doc review in order to cut down on the emails provided in discovery. Remember that the client here is herself a lawyer (Harvard Law School, Cravath), so she bears the responsibility for a major decision like this. This may have been a bad strategic decision on her part, or it may have been too expensive to go any other way. But her lawyers are not at fault.

Note: I am a former SV lawyer, but I do not know any of the lawyers who represented her (or even what firm it was).

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

#517

Post by xhedley »

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?

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 you that discussing pornography and sex work in business meetings can make women feel uncomfortable.

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

#518

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#519

Post by natecavanaugh »

Boothroid wrote: post #206
natecavanaugh wrote: post #170

I totally agree sexism is a thing, not just in Silicon Valley, but in every strata of our society. And I'm saying this not just as a life long conservative, but also as someone who has had many strong women in his life who have absorbed a ton of crap simply because they are women, including my mother, grandmother and basically almost every woman I've ever met. I don't like blaming of societal issues for a person's ac…

Sounds like you are suffering from internalised misandry.

Or, because I am a man, I seem to be in a pretty good position to condemn the negative behaviors of my gender in general. If a woman does it, she's viewed as having a prejudice or being reactionary, or going simply off of her own experiences.

I could also list the negative behaviors of women in general, but since the article was about sexism in Silicon Valley, and that most power positions there are dominated by men, it really wouldn't make much sense to start criticizing the group more likely to be the victim of it.

But hey, as long as sarcasm and ad-hominem is working for you, go for it.

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

#520

Post by appleflaxen »

abtinf wrote: post #344

"I didn’t have time to go through all my emails to figure out which ones to give Kleiner, so during the discovery process we gave them practically everything, some 700,000 emails — most of which we could have legally withheld. ... During depositions, they brought up everything from my nanny’s contract to an exercise I’d done in therapy where I listed resentments. Emails to friends, emails to my husband, emails to oth…

why would you blacklist the individual for having incompetent council?
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