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Ellen Pao Drops Appeal of Gender Discrimination Suit
McGruber writes: Jeff Bezo's newspaper is reporting that Ellen Pao is dropping her appeal of the gender discrimination suit she lost against her former employer, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Pao sued KPCB in 2012, claiming that women were not given fair consideration in the male-dominated workplace. She also said that a male colleague with whom she had an affair unfairly cut her out of e-mail correspondence and upper management did nothing about it. She was fired soon after filing her suit. After a bruising month-long trial in which her personal character and work performance were repeatedly brought into question, a jury of six men and six woman ruled that there was no evidence of gender discrimination.
I would say expect another 2-week long series from Wired on what a grave injustice this is and how incredibly brave and heroic Ellen Pao is, but she resigned from their sister company.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Maybe she's just acknowledging what everyone who isn't a die-hard SJW has known all along--that her suit was a joke and so is she.
Dropping the suit is playing right in to the "it's too hard to fight" theme. Surely if she wants to actively fight gender discrimination she should push it as long as she can.
The jury disagreed with your premise that there ever was gender discrimination in this specific case. Just like you can't cure cancer if there is no cancer, you can't fight gender discrimination when incompetent employee was fired for a cause.
This is a win for common sense everywhere.
If she really wanted to fight discrimination, she might go find some discrimination and fight it. The people who heard all of the evidence say there was no gender discrimination at her workplace.
I've heard only a tiny bit of the evidence, only enough to know that she does some really foolish things.
Looking at what happened to reddit, I wish Ellen Pao would fuck off already. The whole site is now a shithole.
If she really wanted to fight discrimination, she might go find some discrimination and fight it
I'd normally believe that but people like her and SJW's don't, they won't fight for people who are actually discriminated against, they won't fight or protest actual lack of rights for women in various african or middle eastern countries either. Ideologues are gonna ideologue.
Om, nomnomnom...
Her claim is that "I saw how hard it was going to be to win when every potential juror who expressed a belief that sexism exists in tech — a belief that is widely recognized and documented — was not allowed to serve on the jury,"
I don't think I'm somebody who knee-jerk jumps to discrimination. However, if they were filtering out jurors who believe that sexism exists in tech, that certainly seems to be unfair, IMO. Most people certainly would not consider it fair if a gay person was filing a discrimination suit and jurors who believe that discrimination against gay people exists were excluded from sitting on the jury.
I'm not necessarily saying that was the case here, and I haven't read enough to have a strong opinion on whether the case had merit or not. But if those allegations are true then that certainly stands in the way of a fair trial and should be fixed.
they won't fight or protest actual lack of rights for women in various african or middle eastern countries
That requires actual WORK. Much easier to sit on your lazy hippie ass and nitpick and whine about a bunch of stupid bullshit here.
She also said that a male colleague with whom she had an affair unfairly cut her out of e-mail correspondence and upper management did nothing about it.
These sorts of petty fights aren't uncommon these days. Most project management books and classes talk about things like allocating resources, "managing up," agile vs waterfall, etc, but managers spend a surprising amount of time dealing with bizarre interpersonal issues and personal issues that don't really show up in the books. If I were teaching a management class, the first chapter would be "how to get your underlings to overcome weird personal issues."
The fight about the radio in Office Space feels sadly real.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"But in her statement on Wednesday, Ms. Pao said that she was still ordered to pay those to resolve the lawsuit."
She's playing the "I am a victim" card, to play that card she needs to portray herself as a victim. Most likely she is just lying here, like she did in the lawsuit itself.
She's not a victim, she's an aggressive attacker, attacking her employer for a failed affair with a co-worker. I have zero pity for her.
I know that it's the Slashdot way to just assume her case was groundless simply because a jury ruled that way
No, I think that most people assume her case was groundless because she has a long history of being an infamously shitty manager who gets fired from every company she works for, because she makes stupid fucking decisions like having affairs with married men at work, and because she's married to a skeevy guy with his own history of business failures and discrimination lawsuits.
I haven't followed Pao's case so I have no informed opinion on it.
However, I do believe that jury selection processes are so tainted that it's tough to get a fair trial. The process is supposed to be about finding jurors without biases that would affect their decision, but it's actually about putting people on the jury that can be swayed by the prosecution and defense.
I had jury duty a few months ago and, during the selection process, the prosecutor asked who all the scientists and engineers were. It turned out to be about a third of the jury pool, and none of us was selected except a single one who worked for a government lab. Did the case involve any scientific or engineering matters? Not really. It was a drunk driving/hit and run/leaving the scene of an accident thing. My hypothesis is that the police botched the investigation and there was no real physical evidence of guilt, and that the case was based on he said/she said.
The prosecutor deliberately removed people from the jury pool because they could think critically and would not blindly swallow assertions. And it worked: I checked the court records and the defendant was convicted.
That doesn't mean that the "deck is stacked against the employee", it means that a lot of lawsuits are groundless. It means that we should reconsider the entire idea of "sex discrimination lawsuits" since they are obviously being massively abused.
Actually, I think, once she had an consensual affair with someone at work, she lost any credibility filing a sex discrimination lawsuits (the same is, of course, true for men).
Actually, I think, once she had an consensual affair with someone at work, she lost any credibility filing a sex discrimination lawsuits
Why? Those are two completely orthogonal issues and are essentially unrelated.
No, they are not unrelated. This is not some criminal trial, where evidence can be suppressed and become irrelevant.
The jury in the case had a lot of questions about Pao's affair
To most people, they want a victim to be a victim, not to use their sex as a way to possibly get ahead, which is sure as hell what it looked like.
After reading a lot of the testimony, I came to the conclusion that is exactly what she was doing. Her account of the "pressure" was unconvincing, and her account that the guy sexually assaulted her in 2006 after she was hit by a taxi ( she claimed she was unable to move in a daze, while he was innapropriately touching her) Something a little odd about that whole story, unless you buy into her having Stockholm syndrome. I mean innapropriate touching is sexuall assault, so why didn't she make criminal charges against the guy then?
She had vivid memories, except when she didn't. And her memories seemed to falter on matters that might not have made her look so good.
Serious credibility problem here.
Finally, after all these apparent insults, she offered for KP to pay her 10 million in exit money. They didn't, and she filed the suit.
You can believe whatever you want. I'll come to the conclusion that she rather liked her money, and was having a rather good time until things went south.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.