Ellen Pao Fights Prejudice in ‘Progressive’ California
ELLEN PAO, the Silicon Valley executive, was born in 1970 and raised in Maplewood, New Jersey, the middle of three daughters of ambitious, hard-working, patriotic Taiwanese-American immigrant parents. Her father was a math professor at New York University, her mother a computer science engineer at the University of Pennsylvania.
When Ellen was 10, her mother taught her to code, to write instructions for a computer. Both parents gave Ellen civic instructions, too, encouraging her to think of the United States, and her role in it, in simple, positive terms. Work hard, and do an outstanding job. Any racist jokes or anti-Asian rhetoric you hear will come from second-rate people. Ignore those people and what they say. The best people will recognize and reward your excellence.
At first, that seemed to be true. All three Pao daughters studied hard and graduated from Princeton University. In 1991, Ellen earned a Princeton engineering degree while serving as managing editor of the Daily Princetonian.
In 1994, she earned a law degree from Harvard.
But then things started to turn. She joined a well-known law firm, Cravath, Swaine & Moore, made a good salary, but disliked the feel of the firm. Sexual harassment seemed to be condoned there, almost encouraged. One creepy story had a senior Cravath, Swaine partner standing outside the office of a female colleague, staring at her while licking an ice cream cone.
Pao returned to Harvard, dated a fellow student named Roger Kuo, got an MBA in 1998, and moved out to Silicon Valley. She married Kuo, who became an investment banker, but they divorced.
In 2005, Pao joined a prominent venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Kleiner Perkins had played a key role in the rise of Google, Amazon and Twitter. She became the Kleiner Perkins chief of staff and a junior partner but, again, the culture of the firm was not easy for her.
It was a culture which lionized risk-taking, and she felt the men who thrived in such places often couldn’t be bothered to treat women with respect. What Ellen regarded as simple human decency many of the hard-charging men in the firm called “political correctness.”
Pao felt if she said little in a Kleiner Perkins meeting, and spent her time affirming the views of others, then she was ‘too quiet’ and was letting others ‘own the room.’ She got the message that she’d never be taken seriously if she acted that way.
Yet if she spoke up, and challenged something said, then she ‘talked too much’ and ‘wasn’t a team player.’ She felt there was a stereotype that Asian women preferred to be subservient.
She wasn’t invited to company dinners, company ski trips and golf outings. One boss suggested she take a course in stand-up comedy so she could “get air-time.”
When a group of men and women met to discuss business, women were asked to get the coffee, and to take notes.
Sometimes women were even asked to babysit for partners’ children; men were not asked to do this. Some men defended the exclusion of women from Kleiner Perkins events by saying that having women around “kills the buzz.”
In Silicon Valley, among educated people, in the “progressive” state of California, this was infuriating.
Lonely, Pao had a brief sexual relationship with a married colleague who pursued her hard and told her he was getting a divorce. When she realized he was not, in fact, heading for divorce, Ellen broke things off. The man she’d been involved with got promoted, began supervising Ellen, and gave her bad performance reviews.
She met — and four months later married — an African-American hedge fund manager, Alphonse “Buddy” Fletcher. Fletcher was a complex and litigious man, whose hedge fund later declared bankruptcy. But one thing he was very concrete about was that Ellen should stick up for herself more, and think more critically about the discrimination routinely practiced against her as an Asian-American and as a woman.
Fletcher and Pao bought a condo in San Francisco. In 2008, Pao gave birth to a daughter, Matilda. When she took maternity leave, one of the firm’s partners made her feel she was ‘abandoning ship,’ that she was ‘leaving for a manicure while her ship was in a typhoon.’ She shortened her maternity leave by a month.
In 2012, while pregnant with her second child, she filed suit against Kleiner Perkins, charging four counts of gender discrimination. Soon after filing the suit, she miscarried. She feared the miscarriage was caused by work stress.
After leaving Kleiner Perkins, she became interim chief executive at Reddit, and raised salaries for its staff.
But after announcing that Reddit would no longer include revenge porn on its site, she got the thanks of many women and political progressives — plus a barrage of tasteless insults and even a few death threats. She was at Reddit for just 18 months.
In 2015, her suit against Kleiner Perkins went to trial and the trial was brutal; a lawyer asked Pao dismissively what she herself had ever done for the cause of women. Kleiner Perkins had also found a “resentment chart” which Pao had created and used this to portray her as a congenitally angry, vindictive person. One Kleiner Perkins partner called her “a cancer.”
Ellen Pao lost her case in court, on all four counts. It seemed to her that the pricy Kleiner Perkins legal team had been able to stuff the jury pool with people skeptical that highly paid women in the tech field could ever be victims of sexism. Even lawyers who told her they hoped she’d win said things like, ‘You don’t make a good victim,’ as if her court case was a play, a piece of entertainment, for which she was sadly miscast.
She was also frustrated that her lawyers coached her to keep her answers short, and ‘Don’t get emotionally involved with attacks on you.’ As a result, she thought she must have seemed “robotic” to the jury.
Wanting to make her case on a broader stage and in far more personal terms, in 2017, Pao published a memoir, “Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change.” The memoir began, and ended, by describing the U.S. in the simple, glowing terms she’d learned in childhood. But at the heart of the memoir was a barbed portrait of racism and sexism in Silicon Valley.
Pao was heartened by how many women told her that her case had emboldened them to speak out about sexism in their own workplace, and that certain changes were being made.
For its part, Kleiner Perkins, after trumpeting its victory in the legal case, and treating Pao’s suit as wholly without merit, moved to improve itself in four ways. The firm installed “hidden bias training”; started a “diversity report” to track its progress; raised the percentage of female and minority interns and fellows; and pledged to do better at promoting and retaining them.
‘We don’t have a problem,’ they said in court. And then they moved to fix it.