Ellen Pao, the former venture capitalist who lost a high-profile sex discrimination case in Silicon Valley last week, claimed that her employer had accused her variously of being too “passive and reticent” or of speaking up too much.
It’s a refrain that will be familiar to women in workplaces everywhere, but it has a particular resonance in the closely entwined worlds of venture capital and technology, which sometimes seem to combine the very worst of the old boys’ network with a juvenile frat house mentality.
Although Ms Pao’s claim that she was denied promotion by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, her former employer, because of her gender was denied in court, the verdict is not the end of the affair. It has rekindled a public