Fighting the patriarchy: The Pao effect
There were so many times Ellen Pao could have taken money in exchange for silence. Before she filed her gender discrimination lawsuit against the tony venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, she could have negotiated a severance, preserving relationships. She did not.
At three intervals after she filed suit, Kleiner attempted to settle, offering her significant money (at one point she reported that the figure was likely between three and five million) in exchange for her silence. Pao pursued a trial—the very public March 2015 spectacle that stretched out over three weeks. She lost. Even after that, she said she turned down a $2.7 million payment from Kleiner that would have covered her legal costs because the firm requested that she sign a non-disparagement clause. That could have at least recouped her legal fees, and those that Kleiner demanded she cover.
By then, many of the firm’s worst offenses had been aired publicly, and we all would have understood if Pao had chosen to take the money and repair to Hawaii. But the point of Pao’s suit was never the money.
Pao refused to sign the gag order, and instead recorded her story in a memoir entitled Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change. She could have just as easily called it What Happened: Like another powerful female figure who recently lost the fight of her life, Hillary Clinton, Pao used the book to reveal, at long last, what she was thinking and how she was feeling in the run-up to her trial—and as she forged a new career path as a very public figure.
Pao and Clinton are both products of the moment in which we find ourselves, one in which it no longer works to maneuver within systems in which certain people seem doomed to fail. Instead, both women are speaking out at the expense of the system. Pao, like Clinton, writes with an incisive anger that has been throttled so long that its emergence is, by turn, startling and uncomfortable—and a great relief. Of course she is angry!
She is angry at the individuals who treated her poorly, and at the system that judges women harshly while forgetting the failures of fallible men. Early on, Pao calls out the double standard that results in our collective memory of Marissa Mayer as a greedy and ineffective CEO while we forget the names of ineffective male CEOs. “Can you name the founder/CEO who hit his girlfriend 117 times?” she asks, “Or the one recently accused of writing computer programs to perpetuate fraud at Zenefits?” (Let history show: That’s Gurbaksh Chahal and Parker Conrad.)
Souce – Wired
