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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.
Now, she should be liable for the costs of the suit.
-Styopa
People like that with such flawed manipulative characters deserved to be tossed out on their rears for wasting everyone's time. She wasn't even a good worker to boot.
The snarky "Jeff Bezo's newspaper" is a crappy lil passive aggressive dig at the paper's owner. Grow a pair submitard.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
In a lawsuit, both sides get to filter out some jurors. I'm sure her lawyers also filtered out plenty of conservative "discrimination NEVER exists" types as well. That's how fairness works.
Both lawyers get unlimited "cause" challenges, where they must convince the judge that the juror cannot make an impartial decision. Ellen Pao is likely claiming every juror who thought sexism is rampant in the tech industry was the target of a successful challenge with cause. If the judge is sufficiently convinced by the defense attorneys, this could have happened.
None of these challenges would count against the defense attorneys' peremptory challenges, which both sides get a limited number of and do not require an explanation. Attorneys can claim their opponent made peremptory challenges based on discriminatory criteria, but I believe this is quite hard to prove.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Some years ago we had a post from a lawyer who had experience with employment related law suits. He told us that his advice to clients was to give up and not file a lawsuit. He said that the reality was that the deck was stacked in favor of the employer and he estimated that maybe 10% of lawsuits against employers were won by the employee. I know that it's the Slashdot way to just assume her case was groundless simply because a jury ruled that way. All I can tell you is that while that may be true, we can't make that assumption. Juries are staffed with stupid people a lot of times who aren't fit to be judges on anything. I know because unlike many of you, I've actually served on juries twice. I hope I never get picked again because the whole process has made me permanently cynical about the law and so-called justice in the USA. My brother got fired more than 20 years ago from a low paying job and his employer lied about the reason he was fired in a hearing about whether my brother should get paid unemployment money or not. Whoever heard the case ruled against my brother because it was just his word against theirs and neither could prove their side. Ellen was facing long odds and I wasn't there to hear testimony so I can't judge the merits of her case, but it's idiotic to just assume the jury got it right. If you actually believe that juries almost always get it right you better pray you don't ever have to go to court and have your important case decided by 12 idiots. The last jury I served on had 3 guys in the jury room prior to the day's testimony trying to out argue the other 2 that they were stupider with technology than the other 2 were. These are the kinds of people who decide cases - morons who try to argue that they're the stupidest person in the room and take pride in winning that argument.