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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.
Surely if she wants to actively fight gender discrimination she should push it as long as she can.
Odds are good she's way past that point by now.
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.
Now, she should be liable for the costs of the suit.
-Styopa
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.
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.
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...
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/
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.
It is more lucrative to sit back and play the victim rather than actually fight things in court.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
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."
She had an inter-office love affair with someone higher up in the foodchain and shit went south....and somehow this is a gender issue??
Yes, the guy should have had the decency to have a gay affair with a bloke in the office afterwards and drop him from email lists too.
Her comment reads as if someone went through all candidates and rejected *all* those with opinions that agreed with Pao's, which is impossible - the jury is selected from a pool by both sides being able to dismiss a certain number of candidates until the pool fits the jury box. This means that while KP's lawyers could reject those with strong feelings about sexism existing in tech, Pao's lawyers similarly used her selections to load the jury with candidates that would be beneficial for her.
A jury is constructed from "peers", not from "people with beliefs that solely support my case".
She got a fair trial, she's just playing the "unfair" card because she lost.
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
"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 take that as a dig at all those who were outraged yesterday when National Geographic announced it was selling its media outlets to Murdoch. Pot, meet kettle.
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.
Lets assume that somehow jury got it 100% wrong and there was a clear case of gender discrimination. Then you have a point. Thing is, such premise should be questioned if you intend to ask the government to forcibly intervene via courts. I would go as far as saying that 12 jurors, who heard the case, deliberated and reached conclusion are a lot more likely to be right than wrong.
Thing is, the law and social justice mores diverge quite a bit. She might have a case if you use such imprecise and support-focused standard, and encouraged by the social media support she failed to check her expectations and misjudged the merits of the case when a much more objective approach was applied. That is, when facts were impartially evaluated instead of relying on her narrative and interpretation, the case was found without merit. This doesn't mean that she didn't felt discriminated, and should be denied all support. It does mean that such support should not include any coercion by the government entity.
If you're having an affair at work, don't complain when people eventually kick one of the two participants out; having squabbling ex lovers around is disruptive. That's why people don't shit where they eat.
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.
You're only describing one side of this. Yes, jurors who are already convinced sexism is happening were filtered out, but so were those that are convinced that sexism isn't happening. The point is to have a set of people that have little to no information or opinion on the topic, to provide them the facts of this case, define sexism as enshrined in law, and to let them reach an unbiased verdict whether the facts entail that the law was violated.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
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.
What the hell? People who have workplace affairs should be fired - not have management support them by forcing the affair to continue.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Pao's essay is bizzare -- she complained about "trolls" while she herself used the troll tactic of claiming to be swamped with private messages of support:
As the trolls on Reddit grew louder and more harassing in recent weeks, another group of users became more vocal. First a few sent positive messages. Then a few more. Soon, I was receiving hundreds of messages a day, and at one point thousands. These messages were thoughtful, well-written and heartfelt, in stark contrast to the trolling messages, which were usually made up of little more than four-letter words. Many shared their own stories of harassment and thanked us for our stance.
The writers of these messages often said they could not imagine the hate I was experiencing. Most apologized for the trolls’ behavior. And some apologized for standing on the sidelines. “I didn’t do anything, and that is why I am sorry,” one user wrote. “I stayed indifferent. I didn’t attack nor defend. I am sorry for my inaction. You are a human. And no one needs to be treated like you were.” Some apologized for their own trollish behavior and promised they had reformed.
As the threats became really violent, people ended their messages with “stay safe.” Eventually, users started responding on Reddit itself, using accurate information and supportive messages to fight back against the trolls.
If Pao had really received "hundreds of messages a day" from supporters, then she should have been easily able to use crowfunding to pay her legal bills.... IMHO.
Oh I'm sorry, Social Justice Warrior is a bit of a misnomer isn't it?
Is Social Justice Bully more appropriate, or how about SJS? Social Justice Sociopath?
She had no case worth pursuing.
Her character is related to why she lost, but not in the way you hope so much.
It's the reason why she brought suit in the first place. See the fable of the frog and the scorpion.