By Yao Sun
Ellen Pao has been in the center of the spotlight in 2015. She is one of the few females working in Silicon Valley, serving as the interim CEO of the popular social media site Reddit until a couple of weeks ago. Ms. Pao is a highly educated and aspiring woman. She holds a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University, an MBA and a JD degree from Harvard University. She was born to Chinese immigrant parents and is both fluent in English and Mandarin. In early February 2015, Pao sued Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers for sexual harassment and racial discrimination. Her lawsuit draws people’s attention back to the male-dominated culture of Silicon Valley.
At the center of the lawsuit is Ms. Pao’s former boss John Doerr who forced her in an affair and then retaliated against her when she broke if off, according to Ms. Pao. She also accused Kleiner of treating her “despicably, maliciously, fraudulently and oppressively” from “an improper and evil motive amounting to malice.” However, a few days later, the firm said that Ms. Pao did not succeed at Kleiner because she “lacked the ability to lead others, build consensus and be a team player, which is crucial to a successful career as a venture capital senior investing partner.” There are different opinions about Pao’s lawsuit: some are saying that she is taking advantage of being a woman to cover up her incapability as an employee. Others are defending Pao and saying that her lawsuit is one of the many as nearly every month there are accusations from female employees of men behaving badly at the workplace in Silicon Valley. Deborah Rhode, a law professor at Stanford, told the New Yorker reporter Vauhini Vara that, “the sort of evidence you’re seeing in the Ellen Pao case is very typical of what’s out there in Silicon Valley. There are no smoking guns; much of it is what social scientists call micro-indignities—small incidents that viewed individually may seem trivial, but when viewed cumulatively point to a practice of insensitivity and devaluation that can get in the way of work performance.”
Before people had decided on how they felt about Pao, she was once again in the headline. In early July, more than 213,000 Reddit users demanded Pao to leave her position as the interim chief executive of Reddit in response to the abrupt dismissal of a well-liked employee earlier this month. “The attacks were worse on Ellen because she is a woman,” said Sam Altman, a member of the Reddit board. “And that’s just a shame against humanity.” However, according to Ms. Pao’s own account, it was not her decision to fire the AMA moderator Victoria Taylor and she was just scapegoating for someone else. Former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong also bluntly commented that Pao was set up to fail from the start of her hiring at Reddit, which echoed Ms. Pao’s claims (http://gawker.com/former-reddit-ceo-youre-all-screwed-1717901652). In addition, Reddit’s former chief engineer Bethanye Blount backed Ms. Pao by pointing out that she believed Pao had been placed on a “glass cliff”, a term used to describe women being set up for failure by being put in leadership roles during crises. And Pao was, indeed, hired by Reddit two years ago in the midst of an internal reform. However, the board of directors at Reddit denied their accusations and insisted that there was no sexual or racial discrimination, or setup against anyone at Reddit.
If we look Ellen Pao’s incidents at a larger picture, we can see how female employees and women of color still face barriers to gain recognition because of their race and gender. Back in 1994 also in Silicon Valley, Rena Weeks, a legal secretary, filed a complaint against Martin R. Greenstein, a well-regarded partner at the Baker & McKenzie law firm for sexual harassment. The jury awarded Weeks seven million dollars in damages. Even though later a state jury cut it in half, it was still a stunning amount. However, two decades later harassment and other forms of discrimination are still preventing women from getting equal treatment and career opportunities. Melissa Hart, a law professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, pointed to some of the language that Kleiner Perkins and its employees used to describe Pao’s problems at the firm: she wasn’t a team player, she raised her voice. In theory, these are traits that could make any employee look bad, but in practice, as social scientists have documented, discussions of these traits themselves have gendered implications. When a firm argues that a woman didn’t do well for these kinds of reasons, Hart said, “You need to stop and inquire, ‘What was meant by that?’ ” (http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-ellen-pao-trial-what-do-we-mean-by-discrimination)
From both cases, we can see that people have been asking questions about whether Ellen Pao was a competent employee and a capable CEO. If we look from a different perspective, then more people should be asking whether she would be treated differently if she were a man.
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