Ellen Pao and the Sexism You Can’t Quite Prove

[Starry Messenger]

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/03/ellen-pao-and-the-sexism-you-cant-quite-prove.html

It happens all the time when my husband and I are at work events together. Cocktail Party Guy asks my husband about how things are going at his news site, and he answers. Then Cocktail Party Guy asks me how our dogs are, and I answer, before pivoting the conversation back to work — and later rolling my eyes as we walk away. It is not impolite. It is not inappropriate. But it is still, at least in my mind, sexist. Both me and my husband love our work. Both me and my husband love our dogs. One of us gets asked about our work. One of us gets asked about our dogs.

It is a form of soft discrimination that I fear might be all too familiar to all too many women — and often I find it hard to explain to my male friends and colleagues. Occasionally, I even find myself struggling to convince them that it is discrimination, and that it has consequences.


I found myself going back to those moments with Cocktail Party Guy while following Ellen Pao’s lawsuit against her former employer, the powerhouse venture-capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers. In the suit, Pao argued that the firm failed to promote her because of her gender. But it was not a cut-and-dry case. Much of it centered around those Cocktail Party Guy moments, ones where one reasonable observer might see nothing going on and another reasonable observer might see clear evidence of sexism.

Exhibit A: Pao’s performance reviews knocked her for her “sharp elbows.” There were similar negative comments in Pao’s male colleagues’ reviews, but they were nevertheless promoted. Does that demonstrate that Kleiner Perkins treated Pao differently because she was a woman? Might they have interpreted her assertiveness as “bitchiness,” and her male colleagues’ assertiveness as “strength” or “conviction”? Maybe she really did have sharp elbows, hurting her relationships with clients? Can’t women ever be criticized for being caustic?