Ellen Pao vs Kleiner Perkins

[funnyvalentine]

Is anyone following the Ellen Pao trial? She's alleging discrimination in Silicon Valley, and not getting promoted because she's a woman. The VC firm she worked for claim she just wasn't as good as her (male) colleagues. The jury are out for deliberations.

There are many articles in the tech press, but I like this one recode.net/2015/03/26/a-fish-is-the-last-to-discover-water-impressions-from-the-ellen-pao-trial/

"And for the women, it happens in incremental steps that often seem so small in isolation that any individual act seems silly to complain about. So we move on. But in aggregate, and with the perspective of hindsight, they are real."

Yes, I've read some of the articles in the tech press. I think it takes a lot of guts to go to court likes she has - pretty much everything is against you. And yes, it's so right about all the individual acts being silly to complain about. God, it can get tiring, though.

I am stunned and pleased she has gone to court to fight her case.

I am pleased she went to court, because it has got it talked about However, I fear that now she's lost it, there will be those men who say there can't be a problem, else she would have won.

It's a shame she lost, and it'll be interesting to see what happens now. I hope others aren't put off speaking out.

But I think it's really hard to prove in court that unconscious bias happens when there's just one person. The defence of just not being quite good enough is tough to disprove. I wonder if there'll be a class action suit soon, which will have the weight of numbers? It's easy to have a defence that one person isn't good enough, but more difficult to say that a group of women were coincidentally just not as good as their male colleagues.