Review: Ellen Pao cracked door for women in tech

She could have walked away with millions from the firm she worked at for seven years, but chose instead to file a bombshell lawsuit in 2012

Review: Ellen Pao cracked door for women in tech

By Jennifer Saba

NEW YORK (Reuters Breakingviews) - Ellen Pao cracked the door open for women in Silicon Valley's notorious bro-culture. The technology investor took on the storied venture-capitalism firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers alleging sexism. She sued and lost. Yet in the five years since her high-profile case, other women have publicly confronted the toxic culture of the tech industry and beyond, yielding more promising results.

Reset: My fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change is Pao's account of her refusal to settle. She could have walked away with millions from Kleiner, the firm she worked at for seven years, but chose instead to file a bombshell lawsuit in 2012. She suffered through bruising public scrutiny for the opportunity to tell her side, unfettered by disclosure agreements that would have demanded her silence.

The result is an insightful tale of a woman's plight in the corporate world and the grievances, large and small, often endured for harbouring ambition. She’s far from the first female to take on corporate patriarchy. Years before Pao was an executive, the “boom-boom room” class-action suit against Smith Barney highlighted Wall Street's sexism, for instance. Pao’s contribution was to shine a light on the supposedly more enlightened realm of Silicon Valley.

Pao grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey, the daughter of Chinese immigrants who instilled in their daughters the idea that persistence and hard work were the keys to getting ahead. An engineering degree from Princeton was followed by law and business diplomas from Harvard.

One of her first gigs was at the New York white-shoe law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore. There, she recounts, Pao learned first-hand the indignities suffered by the females in the workforce. Among them, a woman was sent home for wearing pants; Pao’s boss asked her in the middle of a meeting to go fetch cookies; a department head took 12 male peers to a dinner at Brooklyn's Peter Luger Steak House followed by the strip club Scores.

In 2005, Pao joined Kleiner as chief of staff to managing partner John Doerr, a formidable figure on Sand Hill Road who backed Google and Amazon. She initially liked her job and the window it afforded to the world of startups looking for guidance and capital.

Woven throughout, Pao reveals how firms like Kleiner work, including a “no vote” rule where any partner could shoot down another’s investment. The veto appears meritocratic but instead it fostered a simmering cauldron of politics and back stabbing. Too much money is at stake, with annual management fees in addition to a “carry” that can top 30 percent of investment gains. Partners are richly rewarded, Pao notes, even though venture-capital investment funds consistently perform worse than the stock market.

A romance with a co-worker marked the beginning of her problems. Pao broke off the brief affair but when he was promoted he made life difficult for her. She says her complaints about his behaviour were ignored. Later he left the firm when another woman accused him of similar behaviour. Her colleagues began to freeze her out with negative reviews. She wasn’t invited to a dinner with former vice-president and Kleiner partner Al Gore that was taking place in her own residence. One piece of feedback Pao received stated she had a “female chip on her shoulder.”

She wasn’t completely persona non grata in the Valley. Pao briefly served as Reddit’s CEO. She was later pushed out after what she describes as a difference over growth strategy.

Her trial is a yellow flag for anyone willing to follow in her footsteps. Kleiner threw millions of dollars into defending itself — even retaining the public-relations firm Brunswick. In recalling those weeks in the courtroom, Pao described an insurmountable level of scrutiny: “As a witness, you can’t be too defensive, you can’t interrupt, you can’t correct everything because that makes you seem unfriendly and unlikeable."

More women are coming forward though with their own tales of discrimination. Susan Fowler, an ex-engineer at Uber, wrote a blog post about sexual harassment that was the beginning of the end for founder Travis Kalanick’s tenure as CEO. Gretchen Carlson sued the mighty Fox News and managed to topple its once-untouchable chairman Roger Ailes. Financial lender SoFi booted its boss after reports of similarly unseemly behavior. Alphabet's Google canned an impolitic engineer blogging about the inferiority of women in the field.

This may all seem like progress, and in certain ways it is. But there is a sense the actions taken are more about money than moral transformation. Uber’s US$70-billion valuation has almost certainly taken a hit since Fowler’s screed. SoFi is in a precarious position, too. Advertisers boycotted Fox News after charges that anchor Bill O’Reilly had assailed women for years. The scandals at Rupert Murdoch’s empire threaten its second $US16-billion tilt at Sky.

In a recent op-ed, Pao asks if anything has changed since her lawsuit. “There is a real cost to speaking up,” she said and then implored women to keep raising their voices. In another five years, the answer might be yes.

Latest stories