Professor Deborah Rhode comments on the issues surrounding one of the first high-profile gender discrimination lawsuits in Silicon Valley for Vox.

When Ellen Pao launched her high-profile lawsuit against the venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, she became a hero to feminists who believe Silicon Valley has a pervasive problem with workplace sexism. But while Pao provided some vivid examples of sexist attitudes by some of her male Kleiner Perkins coworkers, a jury found that she hadn't proved that these attitudes were the reason she wasn't promoted as quickly as some of her male colleagues.

While Pao's case might be over, the broader debate about gender discrimination in Silicon Valley will continue. Women at Facebook and Twitter have alleged that they missed out on opportunities because of gender discrimination.

…

“Just the fact that defendants engage in some bias doesn’t establish that it was the cause of plaintiff’s lack of advancement,” says Deborah Rhode, director of the Center on the Legal Profession at Stanford's law school. “It's not at the level of intent. No one at Kleiner Perkins said, 'We don't want women at the partnership level.'”

…

“There was a fair amount of evidence to suggest that her personality was not a good fit for the firm. But I think you have to ask yourself what about the firm's culture made it a poor fit? And was she judged by a different standard from her male colleagues? And that's where I think her evidence was strong,” says Rhode. “John Doerr famously said that she had a female chip on her shoulder, but I think it was the firm's responsibility to ask how it got there. And what about the culture was unwelcoming to women?”

As the Pao case shows, proving that sort of thing to judges and juries can be difficult. But more important, if a firm — or an entire industry — is truly committed to eliminating sexism, it doesn't want to go before a jury or pay out multimillion-dollar settlements. Undertaking the kind of introspection that Rhode describes will likely be the key. And there's one easy way to spot a lot of it: statistics.