After two days of closing arguments and a month of finger-pointing by both sides, the jury is the one voice left to speak on the sex-bias trial against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers that has gripped Silicon Valley. And the issue remains the same as when the trial began: wWill the six-man, six-woman jury that includes a teacher's aide, a painter and a biotech manager believe what he said or what she said?
The "she" in the case is Ellen Pao, a former junior partner who claims she was wrongly denied promotion and retaliated against for complaining to her bosses about discrimination. She's asking for $16 million (€14.5m) for her trouble and seeks punitive damages.
"She realised that the culture needed to change," Pao lawyer Therese Lawless said on Wednesday in her final pitch to jurors in state court in San Francisco. "When she demanded change, she got fired."
The "he" in the story is collective men who run the firm, including managing partner John Doerr, who were portrayed by Ms Pao's lawyers as applying one standard for assignments, pay and promotions to male junior partners, while women suffered from a different one that slowed their advancement. Their testimony portrayed Ms Pao as an opportunist who made baseless allegations of discrimination after a record of poor performance.
'One reason'
"Ellen Pao failed for one reason and one reason only: her view of her skills and performance were far different from the view of Kleiner Perkins, " Lynne Hermle, an attorney for the firm, argued to the jury.
Ms Pao complained of being passed over for promotion in favor of less productive male colleagues, being excluded from an Al Gore dinner and a male-only ski trip and being subjected to smutty talk about pornography and lingerie models during a private plane trip.
The firm countered with partners testifying that those events never happened or were taken out of context. Kleiner also called as a witness one of its star woman partners, Mary Meeker, who said the firm is “the best place to be a woman” in the business. The jurors who began deliberating on Wednesday afternoon will now decide whose story they believe as those in the venture capital and tech industry who have followed the trial avidly await their verdict.
The ethnically diverse panel also includes a prison nurse, a subway manager, a former newspaper company employee and the ex-director of nonprofit that serves meals to the poor.
Investing environment
The case has focused new attention on a startup and investing environment in the US technology capital believed to favour men.
The number of female venture capital partners shrank to 6 per cent last year from 10 per cent in 1999, according to research by Babson College.
Kleiner says nine of its partners, or about 20 per cent, are women, which Mr Doerr said before the trial demonstrated how the firm is “outperforming the rest of the industry when it comes to diversity.”
Kleiner partners sought in court to show that the firm champions women, even as Mr Doerr testified that Ms Pao, who got mostly positive performance reviews from him, had a “female chip on her shoulder.”
Marginalised women
Ms Pao’s side showed the jury that she wasn’t the only woman at the firm who felt marginalised either by subtle sexism, such as being given less mentoring than male junior partners, or by overt harassment.
Former partner Trae Vassallo testified that she got unwanted sexual advances in 2009 and 2011 from the male colleague with whom Ms Pao had a brief affair in 2006 and later complained that he retaliated against her after she broke off the tryst.
Ms Vassallo is a strategic adviser for Kleiner, according to the Menlo Park, California-based firm’s website. Ms Pao is now interim chief executive of Reddit. The jury must decide whether Kleiner discriminated against Ms Pao on the basis of sex and retaliated against her when she complained. Even if the jury finds discrimination, or that the firm didn’t take reasonable steps to prevent it, there’s no guarantee that Ms Pao will be awarded monetary damages. If jurors find that she would been denied promotion and fired anyway because of “poor performance” on the job, the jury is barred from awarding her compensation for lost wages or future earnings. If jurors do award damages, they will hear more evidence about Ms Pao’s carried interest in Kleiner funds and the stock options that were granted to her when she became Reddit’s interim chief executive. The carried interest would be added to the compensatory damages; the stock options subtracted.
Bloomberg
