Ellen Pao, who’s suing the venture capital investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers for gender bias, testified Monday against a former male colleague whom she called “relentless” when she broke off their affair.
Via AP Online:
The lawsuit has spotlighted gender imbalance at elite Silicon Valley investment companies that are stacked with some of the nation’s most accomplished graduates— multiple-degree holders from schools such as Harvard and Stanford who are competing aggressively to back the next Google or Amazon.
But women are grossly underrepresented in the venture capital and technology sectors.
Pao is seeking $16 million in damages after claiming she was passed over for a promotion because she is a woman and then fired in 2012 after she complained.
As a refresher, KPCB is considered one of the top dogs in the venture capital world—and the company itself boasts that it has more female partners than any other VC firm. Evidence from the suit suggests that the firm is anything but female-friendly, though, and essentially made Pao jump through flaming hoops in order to climb a ladder that ultimately came crashing down.
I did a bit of digging around, as one does in the wee hours of the night and when one’s curiosity is piqued by chauvinism, and I found this pithy blog post on the company’s website, published last spring by a woman named Juliet de Baubigny. Its title: “The Tech Sector Needs More Women; Here’s How You Can Make It Happen” (which, ironically, is the theme of 2015 International Women’s Day).