Last Friday was the final day of Ellen Pao’s testimony of the lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers where she was faced with over a 100 question from the 12 jurors after an intensive 4 hours of questioning from the lawyers.
This high profile case has captivated the Silicon Valley and has been a distressing factor for the world of venture capital.
Pao has responded to the queries of the jury for over 2 hour’s which was read out loud by Judge Harold Kahn.
Kahn has permitted the jurors to submit written questions for each of the witnesses and after the attorneys were done with their questioning. The jurors of this trial had been particularly intense about their jury duties and Kahn has been very pleased with their “conscientious” questions.
The questions seemed to have resulted Pao to loosen up a little, since she smiled and even laughed a little from the witness stand even after her over 2 days long relentless cross-examination by Lynne Hermle, the Kleiner Perkins attorney.
After being fired in 2012, one of Silicon Valley’s blue chip investment firms, Pao has sued Kliener Perkins for sex discrimination, retaliation and their failure to protect other women at the company from discrimination in the boys’ club culture which consisted of discussions about pornography and adult TV shows during official trips. She is suing the firm for $ 16 million. The firm has denied all these accusations and instead called her unfit for the job.
Pao told the jury that ever since her arrival at the firm in 2005, she has witnessed investors leaving which generated turmoil within the company leading to dreadful human-resource policies. She mentioned the presence of discrimination against women right from the start.
“It was hard for (the female partners) to be taken seriously,” she said. “People would talk over us, they would interrupt us, and they wouldn’t come to our meetings, and it was OK for them to do that …. It was not a good environment for women.”
Pao also unveiled her feeling about her last three years of pain, ever since the filing of her lawsuit and also voiced out her remorse and the stress that she and the other female employees had to through for testifying in this trial
“Litigation is painful and difficult,” she said. “This is where we ended up because I wasn’t ever able to have that conversation where (Kleiner) said, ‘We take responsibility for creating a culture that is … fair to women.’ “
