Weekend musings: the Kleiner Perkins and Ellen Pao discrimination case
- Summary:
- Gender, race and social bias are endemic, brutal and subtle. What does the Kleiner and Ellen Pao case teach us?
The Kleiner Perkins and Ellen Pao discrimination case informs us about one facet of inequality. Check your personal history to see if this sounds familiar.
I am of an age where in some countries I am a 'senior' which by the way is GREAT for getting seats on public transport, among other things. Yet I still remember my first day at school when, along with hundreds of others, I belonged to no tribe. I was simply 'other.' It was terrifying. By age 11 I remember that as a boy, you didn't associate with girls or risk being labelled a sissy. Those 'experiential lessons' live long in the memory.
But it was when I attended my first sociology class at university that the true nature of discrimination bias, both obvious and subtle hit home. By that stage I'd been living in a mixed race family for some time so when the lecturer asked: "Who among us believes they're not racist?" As a member of a Heinz 57 family, my hand shot up. The reply? "Wrong! We're all biased whether we know it or not and not just race but in attitudes and actions around class, gender, sexual orientation, color and age. We're here to learn what this means and how we need to apply ourselves to its eradication." It was a tough and painful first lesson on a topic I thought I understood. It is a lesson I value as representative of a daily struggle to not just curb but actively counter bias in its many forms. If we're honest, we all face that problem in one or more ways.
The Kleiner Perkins and Ellen Pao discrimination case shone a bright light on that topic from the gender perspective. On its face, the argument was simple:
Her [Ellen Pao] suit, filed in Superior Court here, claimed that Kleiner did not promote her because of her gender, that it retaliated against her for complaining, that it failed to prevent gender discrimination and that it fired her in 2012 for complaining.
In reality the case exposed many subtle facets of discrimination in the workplace. Much has been written in an effort to pick apart the subtleties of what was happening inside that iconic venture capital business. I found the NYT analysis particularly thoughtful if incomplete.
Studies indicate that a lax approach to gender and diversity issues is worse in an industry dominated by men. Just 6 percent of partners at venture capital firms are women, and 77 percent of firms have never had a female investor.
The data show how this affects women, and how a more modern approach to gender dynamics in the workplace could help.
I was particularly struck by long run research findings that say:
Though the study showed the benefits of formal processes, venture firms and start-ups sometimes view these as a waste of time. Small firms often have no human resources employees, and when they do, they are focused almost solely on recruiting.
Yet as heretical as it might sound in Silicon Valley, bureaucracy serves a purpose. Studies have found that women generally perform better in companies with more formal processes, and that women in science have better prospects for employment at start-ups that are more bureaucratic.
As part of a startup, this was something that had not occurred to me yet on reflection it fits my knowledge of women very well. It seems that structure matters to women far more than men. A domestic aside serves to illustrate.
After a recent trip away, my wife proudly announced that she'd cleaned the apartment from top to bottom and organized our walk in closet, adding: "Until you come along and mucky it up." We giggled at that thought yet the truth of that statement and its meaning had passed me by until I saw the analysis referred to above. If you're a man in a heterosexual relationship then this might sound familiar.
More to the point, when we ignore structure as it relates to women then we (as men) are engaging in an unintentional yet subtle form of abuse. This works the other way as well. Gender bias isn't just about the world of men versus women as is often portrayed. It is about the need to be more thoughtful on both sides of the gender divide.
It is incredibly hard in modern society and especially so in the maelstrom of testosterone driven IT. My sense is that the Kleiner case did a very good job of exposing that but it also left out some important points.
Consider for example how the gentrification of San Francisco is dispossessing and disfranchising long time residents. Or what about our images of the so-called hipster culture. A male only thing? In another time and another place we might be tempted to see those trends as emblematic of dangerous political change. If there is a political dimension to the Bay Area and Silicon Valley then it's one that gets measured in economic terms. And just how do these additional factors skew the gender bias problem? What about access to services, housing and so on?
If nothing else and as others have observed, the Kleiner case serves to remind us that bias is very real, if sometimes subtle but always damaging. Nobody wins and to that extent I give the Kleiner partners a lot of credit for not gloating over their courtroom victory. It may turn out to be a Pyhrric victory but ultimately useful at a time when we are all being asked to better understand the meaning of difference.
My hope is that the ripples from this case are not limited to the problem of sexism in the workplace but that employers and managers of all stripes will become more thoughtful around difference both within and across cultures. After all, while we as humans might be considered the most social of species, our ability to destroy is unparalleled.