At the Kleiner Perkins trial in San Francisco, jurors are asking the questions of Ellen Pao, who has been on the stand for several days. Our Heather Somerville is live-blogging.
One exchange, captured by Heather:
Juror: Do you believe that your superiors at Kleiner Perkins saw you as someone who always wanted to have the last word?
Pao: The culture was very much one of debate … where people would talk over each other. Vigorous debate happened live and over email.
This is a key moment in Pao s gender discrimination and retaliation case. Do the jurors see her as credible, sympathetic person with a legitimate claim to justify the $16 million she seeks? The questions will be telling about individual jurors point of view and may indicate the direction of their deliberations after the trial ends. (At this point, the jurors should not have spoken to anyone, including each other about the case).
Jurors questioning witnesses is very rare, something occasionally done in civil cases. So pity the lawyers who have prepped for this case, with hours of depositions. They most likely choreographed this trial down to when they would sip the bottle of Evian water within their reach.
Now, with jurors asking the question, it is like a loose lion rampaging around the sixth floor of San Francisco Superior Court. (But yes, Judge Harold E. Kahn is vetting the questions before he reads them).
After sitting through much of Pao s testimony, I haven t seen the overt sexual discrimination and retaliation that Pao claims, as I wrote in a column today.
But instead, her case appears to be built on a series of slights, odd moments and indignities, which some Silicon Valley women can relate to. These moments, of course, can add up over the course of a woman s career:
All-male dinners and ski trips were a missed opportunity for women to forge alliances that are so critical at this sort of partnership.
But it s true that another response could have been to shrug them off and move forward. Many people, including women, do this daily.
No doubt Pao is an imperfect Norma Rae standing up for women s rights. And Kleiner is far from the Wall Street boom boom room. From Kleiner s point of view, and some of the court testimony backs this up, Pao was at times overly sensitive and resentful of the well-paid work she did.
A few minutes of chit chat about the Playboy Mansion? Men don t faint over such conversations, one male reader wrote. And most of the time, women don t either.
Above: Ellen Pao, right, with her lawyer Therese Lawless.
