Ellen
Pao in particular, while protecting the perpetrators Junior Partner
Ajit Nazre, Chi-Hua Chien, etc
Ellen
Pao graduated from Princeton University with a degree in electrical
engineering, then went on to Harvard Law School and Harvard Business
School.
So
this Ajit Nazre and Chi-Hua Chien, like most from Asia and ghetto
Asians I had worked with, have no respect for America laws, and
continue to practice their 3rd world practice toward women and other
races (they are lawsuits waiting to happen). They treated women, particularly Asian-American women as a second class citizen, as if
they are still in their 3rd world homeland Asia, while the STEM
field/tech industry/John Doerr's VC- KPCB/Patent and Trademarks Office are
protecting these people. Despite I was one of the few, if not the
only one could do emulation project on time and within budget, I was
never hired by Intel's emulation group where nearly all were people
from India, while those interviewed me had never heard of emulation
prior to the job. Some had never touch a computer in their
homeland.
The
sexual harassment, pressured to have a sexual relationship, lying
about not married (while his wife just gave birth to a baby), to set
up to be terminated is what I had experienced over and over again.
Finally, I had to abscond from SFO due to physical harm threats after
I complained about what these people from Asia did to me. Still,
defamation of me continue everywhere I went by people-from-Asia such
I can't secure a job, fired soon if I did such as in the Patent and
Trademark Office despite all my accomplishments and met every
stringent requirements. And now(2013) a failed attempt beheading to
kill me such my EEOC case would go away.
Pao
seeking $16million, which is peanuts, less than a drop in a bucket,
yet John Doerr's firm didn't settle, why??? Did they not think she,
a woman and an Asian at that, wouldn't dare to take the case to
court? And even if she did, the court is not going to rule in favor
of a woman and an Asian, as evidenced by my EEOC case where the AJ Nancy Graham of New Orleans ruled in favor of the Patent and Trademark Office, a powerful government institution, despite the overwhelming evident to support my case.
This week, the tech world will be watching a jury trial between reddit's interim CEO Ellen Pao and her former employer, the illustrious venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (KPCB). Back in 2012, Ellen Pao, then a junior partner at KPCB, filed a lawsuit (PDF) against the firm, alleging systematic gender discrimination against her and other female staff.
It's surprising that Pao vs. Kleiner Perkins wasn't settled long ago. Parties often avoid high-profile trials because they can damage company and personal reputations alike, sometimes irreparably. For KPCB, involvement in the case could tarnish its stellar reputation as the firm that helped build Amazon, Netscape, Genentech, and Google. For Pao, a jury trial will mean putting the details of her private life under a microscope for the world to see. Of course, the two parties could settle at the last minute, but recent reports suggest that the fighting has become so bitter that a last-minute accord seems unlikely.
In a broader sense, this means that lawyers in a San Francisco courtroom will spend the next month fleshing out what could become the most notorious data point in the long-standing contention that overt and not-so-overt discrimination hobbles women in tech and finance. It's no secret that venture capital firms are overwhelmingly male-dominated and that tech firms often exhibit behavior that would be unwelcome in all but the worst fraternities. In her complaint against Kleiner, Pao suggests that she has evidence to prove a litany of awkward sexual overtures made toward her by colleagues, as well as proof of a deafening silence when she brought the issues up to management. KPCB, for its part, says it champions women (PDF) and that Pao created her own drama wherever she went. Whatever the jury decides, the trial with undoubtedly cast light on a complex and difficult issue.
The Book of Longing
With a B.S. from Princeton in electrical Engineering, a degree from Harvard Business School, and a law degree, Ellen Pao was a perfect fit for Kleiner Perkins when she arrived in 2005. But that changed quickly; Pao's complaint against Kleiner Perkins details increasingly awkward interactions with her male peers and superiors starting in 2006. At first, it was simply an overture from fellow Junior Partner Ajit Nazre, who “made inappropriate sexual approaches” toward Pao, which Pao rebuffed. Nazre was married, although “he falsely told her that his wife had left him.”
Pao admits that she ended up having sex with Nazre "two or three times" but then told him in the fall of 2006 that “she would no longer have a personal relationship with him.” At that point, Pao alleges, Nazre began excluding her from meetings, failing to communicate information crucial to her job, and at one point asked the CEO of a company working with Pao to join the board of a company sponsored by Nazre. “When Plaintiff reported Mr. Nazre's actions, she was told that it was unfair, that it never would have happened to a male partner, but that she should just accept it,” the complaint alleges.
Then, on Valentine's Day in 2007, Pao says that she was approached by senior partner Randy Komisar, who asked her out to dinner (saying his wife was out of town) and gave her The Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen, which contains drawings and poems with "strong sexual content." (Komisar alleges that his wife actually bought the book for Pao because Pao and Komisar had discussed Buddhist philosophy together, and Cohen wrote the book after a five-year stint in a Buddhist monastery.)
In the spring of 2007, “at least three” administrative assistants reported that they were being harassed, so Pao says she reported Nazre's and Komisar's actions to the COO, two managing partners, and a senior partner. Weeks went by without a response, so Pao took the complaint to John Doerr, her mentor and boss. Pao alleges that Doerr's colleague, Ray Lane, then approached her and (astoundingly) encouraged Pao to marry Nazre. Pao also alleges that Lane asked her to have a one-on-one lunch with Nazre outside of the office to discuss their relationship, but Nazre made more inappropriate comments and “seemed empowered by KPCB to further retaliate against her.”
Nazre was soon after made a senior partner in Kleiner Perkins' Greentech group, but because of their unworkable relationship, Pao alleges that the company asked her to move her office down the hall from Nazre's new, larger office. She refused, and KPCB then asked her to relocate to the company's China office. Pao refused again.
From there, Pao says she experienced a number of retaliatory actions from KPCB and its senior executives, including the postponing of her 2008 review despite promises that she would be given it before, and then after, her maternity leave. Pao also alleges that on subsequent reviews, KPCB circumvented review protocol and let managers who had little to do with overseeing Pao review her performance.
Pao additionally alleges that she did all the work to retain and build relationships with patent-risk-management company RPX and then had the client taken away from her and given to Komisar because Komisar “needed a win.” When the client complained about Komisar, Pao says she was instructed to cut ties with the company so that Komisar could strengthen his relationship with them. In another example, KPCB partners allegedly organized two dinner events in which only male partners were invited because, as one KPCB associate said, allowing women would “kill the buzz.”
In December 2011, another Junior Partner allegedly complained about sexual advances from Nazre. When Kleiner Perkins hired an outside investigator, Pao's attorneys write, Nazre left the company.
Beyond the detailed harassment, Pao also alleges that women at KPCB receive significantly less in compensation than men. “Male Junior Partners were permitted to add multiple Boards of Director positions and investment sponsorships each year, while female Junior Partners were limited to just one,” the complaint reads. Pao also alleges that female partners were given smaller shares of investment profits as well.
“The discrimination had two forms,” the complaint reads. “Women were not promoted to higher levels within the firm that would have resulted in high allocations, and men at comparable levels to women were allocated larger shares of carried interest.”
Pao has demanded as much as $16 million in damages for lost income at KPCB.
Not a team player
In a trial brief filed last week, nearly three years after Pao filed her original complaint, KPCB offers some hints at how it will fight these charges in front of a jury.
The filing paints a picture of Ellen Pao as someone who is combative and difficult to work with, who never meshed quite well with the venture capital firm's culture. KPCB quotes reviews that Pao received during her employment at the company like “Can be political—complains about other partners at times,” and “At times appears to be pushing too hard to establish herself, instead of being collaborative,” and “territorial and too frequently clashes with partners. Not cited as team player.” (Criticisms like these are common for female executives.)
KPCB writes that in the spring of 2007, Pao had planned to resign for reasons unrelated to harassment and even asked Doerr not to punish Nazre professionally after Pao told him about her relationship with Nazre. “While Pao occasionally included Nazre among the many about whom she complained, those complaints were no different than her complaints about everyone else,” the trial brief reads.
The firm also contends that when it terminated Pao in 2012, the act was not retaliatory, but rather a long time coming. in Pao's 2011 performance review, the firm had originally included a message saying “you are not on track to become a Senior Partner at KCPB," but John Doerr had intervened and argued that Pao was performing well. “Pao continued to be coached on ways to improve her performance,” the brief states.
The firm also says that Pao was uncooperative when it hired an outside investigator in 2011 to look into the harassment claims made by another Junior Partner and Pao. “Contrary to what she had told the partners back in 2007, she now stated that she had been bullied into a relationship by Nazre and that he had retaliated against her for years,” the firm alleges. The outside investigator interviewed 17 KPCB partners and “concluded that Pao's claims were not substantiated.”
KPCB also says that women are well-represented at its firm and that Pao was paid even better than her male peers at the time, although the names, positions, and salaries of those peers have been redacted from the trial brief. "[F]ollowing her supposed complaint about Nazre in 2007, Pao continued to receive salary increases and bonuses (in fact continued to be paid more than her male peers)," the KPCB trial brief adds.
From what KPCB's lawyers have written, it seems as if they will argue that Nazre's lying to Pao about whether or not he was still together with his wife was not harassment and that the relationship, as far as KPCB knew, was consensual. The firm also argues that some of the people making decisions about Pao's salary, bonus, promotions, etc. included women, so a gender discrimination argument becomes “less credible.”
The firm will also argue that Pao is trying to litigate over mere perceived slights. “Here, many of the alleged discriminatory acts involve such minutiae as Pao not sitting in the front row at a meeting, Pao not sitting at the table during an event, Pao's office not being in 'the power corridor' (whatever that means), Pao not being included on an applicant's interview schedule, Pao being asked to take notes at a meeting—among many, many others,” the trial brief notes. “None of these alleged actions evencomes close to being an adverse employment action sufficient to constitute unlawful discrimination.”
KPCB argues that many of Pao's claims have exceeded a statute of limitations and are isolated incidents that don't constitute “continuing violations.” In some ways, the information that KPCB offers seems to hinder its argument that the firm never heard her harassment complaints, but the company will attempt to prove that Pao sat on her actionable information and wiled away her time before her statute of limitations was up. Pao, KPCB’s attorneys claim, “asked a friend in 2008 for ‘a good lawyer for employment law issues that will represent employees… I need to get one of the partners in my office to stop harassing me and the management at KP won’t help, so I’d love to understand my rights and their obligations.’”
“It is clear that Pao believed as early as 2008 that KPCB had potentially violated her rights... And although she consulted and hired counsel and mustered her evidence, she sat on those rights,” KPCB’s lawyers continue, asking that the court throw out all evidence pointing toward allegedly discriminatory action that was collected before March 11, 2011.
KPCB's lawyers will also undoubtedly try to poke holes in Pao's argument by differentiating between individual instances of harassment that the firm could not have known about and a systematic discrimination against women. "Focusing on the evidence that is relevant to this claim, KPCB will show that it did take reasonable steps to prevent unlawful discrimination."
The tough stuff
The Pao case is complicated enough as it is, but over the past several years, events in Pao's life have muddied the waters and provided a salacious backdrop for her adversary to use to call her motives and her request for relief into question. In 2007, Pao married Alphonse "Buddy" Fletcher, a hedge fund manager with a brilliant career in the financial industry. In 2011, Fletcher, a black man, sued the board of directors at The Dakota for defamation and discrimination after he tried and failed to get approval to buy another apartment in the famous building where John Lennon was shot. That lawsuit led to an investigation of Fletcher's finances, which revealed some very concerning insolvencies. Fletcher's main fund filed for bankruptcy in 2012, right around the time that Pao filed her lawsuit against KPCB.
The other reason that this case will be closely watched will be for information on reddit. After Pao left KPCB (she says she was wrongfully terminated; KPCB says it was planning to let her go anyway and offered her a generous severance package, with offers to help her find employment elsewhere) she soon scooped up a job as interim CEO of reddit (disclosure: Ars and reddit share a parent company, namely Advance Publications). KPCB says that Pao is now in such a good position, with reddit being valued at a little over $500 million, that she has no need for relief because she's better off now than she was then. Pao, however, says reddit's valuation is about half that sticker price and claims she still deserves payment from KPCB. Documentation about reddit's valuation will likely be filed under seal, but there's a chance that some more salient information will trickle out, especially if the jury awards damages to Pao.
The very public and very dirty fighting between the two parties will no doubt make for an interesting court performance. Follow Ars to get the latest on the opening arguments this week.
[Note: The original image on this post was taken from Flikr and had mistakenly identified the woman pictured as Pao. It has been replaced.]
SAN FRANCISCO — Many women in technology believe Silicon Valley is stuck in the past. They say they are rarely hired, promoted or taken seriously, and are confronted on a daily basis by sexism and harassment. They feel demeaned and discouraged.
Now, in a suit set to go to trial this week, a jury will pass judgment about whether one woman suffered discrimination. The proceedings could resonate widely: A finding of liability will be seen as a vindication of women’s complaints about the high-tech world; failure of the suit might supply ammunition to those who feel gender issues are being overplayed.
The accuser is Ellen Pao, who worked at one of the valley’s most prominent venture capital firms, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. At the center of the suit is John Doerr, a legendary investor who was Ms. Pao’s boss and, according to court papers, practically a father to her. How the man with the Midas touch let his very proud, very image-conscious shop become embroiled in scandal is a question lurking behind the suit.
Ms. Pao says a married colleague pressured her into an affair and then retaliated against her when she broke it off. When she complained, she says she was discriminated against and got poor reviews, resulting ultimately in her dismissal. She accuses Kleiner of treating her “despicably, maliciously, fraudulently and oppressively” from “an improper and evil motive amounting to malice.”
Kleiner fired back last week in a scorched-earth response filed in civil court here, saying the affair was consensual and there was no discrimination. Ms. Pao did not succeed at Kleiner, the firm said, because she “lacked the ability to lead others, build consensus and be a team player, which is crucial to a successful career as a venture capital senior investing partner.”
No matter whose arguments prevail, the trial promises a rare unscripted peek at Silicon Valley, where every interview tends to be overseen by a publicist. Court papers show it to be a place where colleagues become intimately involved, break up messily, work incessantly and promote themselves remorselessly — a place, in short, like almost everywhere else in America, although perhaps a little more amorous. The couple first had sex “at a work event,” the papers say.
Ms. Pao is seeking as much as $16 million in damages to replace the income she says she never had a chance to make at Kleiner.
Since the suit was filed three years ago, Silicon Valley’s treatment of women has become a major flash point, as nearly every month brings new accusations of men behaving badly. Critics charge that start-up entrepreneurs feel entitled to act like jerks, and that the venture capitalists continue to pour money in because they are afraid of missing the next big thing.
A case in point is Snapchat, the disappearing-message service. Last spring, emails that its chief executive wrote a few years ago to his Stanford fraternity brothers surfaced. They were contemptuous of women to a degree that is unquotable in a newspaper. He apologized after the emails became public.
A few months later, Snapchat raised a new investment round valuing it at $10 billion. Among those supplying cash was Kleiner Perkins.
There is an uproar over a lack of diversity in tech, highlighted most recently by Jesse L. Jackson Sr. and his Rainbow PUSH Coalition’s campaign for more inclusiveness. But the clubby world of venture funding remains almost exclusively male.
The total number of female partners at venture capital firms has declined to 6 percent from 10 percent in 1999, according to a report last fall from the Diana Project, a research effort on female entrepreneurs. Fortune magazine, analyzing slightly different data, found the number of female V.C.s increased in 2014 by exactly one.
“Silicon Valley is far from perfect at living up to our ideals,” said David A. Bell, a partner at the Fenwick & West law firm who has been measuring gender diversity in the valley for a decade. “It is clear that women are underrepresented at all levels.”
Kleiner contends that Ms. Pao’s suit is not only wrong in its specifics but also that the firm is being unfairly maligned. It says that over 20 percent of its partners are women, and that it backs start-ups run by women at four times the rate of the rest of the industry.
Photo
John Doerr, a successful investor, was Ms. Pao’s boss.CreditAraya Diaz/Getty Images for TechCrunch
“We look forward to clearing our name in court,” said Christina Lee, a Kleiner spokeswoman.
Ms. Pao did not respond to a request for comment left with her lawyer, Alan B. Exelrod.
Her original complaint, filed in May 2012, has already become part of Silicon Valley lore. It said that a Kleiner partner did not invite her or any other women to an important dinner because “women kill the buzz”; that another Kleiner partner inappropriately gave her Leonard Cohen’s sex-drenched “Book of Longing”; and that this same partner told her “the personalities of women” did not lead to success at Kleiner “because women are quiet.”
A Princeton-trained engineer and Harvard-trained lawyer who has deep experience in the technology field, Ms. Pao first came under media scrutiny when she married Alphonse Fletcher Jr. in 2007, after her affair with the colleague, Ajit Nazre, ended. Mr. Fletcher, a financier, has a history of both suing and being sued. His hedge fund is bankrupt and pension funds are suing to recover their investments amid accusations of fraud.
Mr. Fletcher’s reversals appear in Kleiner’s trial brief, presumably to imply that the couple has serious financial needs and that might be the underlying reason for her suit. The brief reprints the text messages from the breakup of her affair (“I can’t believe I was so wrong about you”), cites her lackluster evaluations (“not sure I really trust her motivations”) and dismisses her claims:
“Pao’s complaints that she did not sit in the front row at a meeting, was not sitting at a table during an event, her office was not in ‘the power corridor’ (whatever that means), she was not included on someone’s interview schedule, she was asked to take notes during a meeting — among many, many others — are simply not even close to being adverse employment actions sufficient to constitute retaliation.”
Some things are not intended for public consumption, however. In another filing, Kleiner’s lawyers said how it managed its investment funds was a trade secret, and asked that the courtroom be closed during any discussion of the details.
Ms. Pao is interim chief executive of Reddit, the news commentary website, which has also been drawn into the case. An anonymous Reddit employee sent a letter to Kleiner’s legal team, asking them to subpoena Reddit employees “for information regarding conflicts with Ellen Pao.” Such information could support the defense’s contention that the person really undermining Ms. Pao at Kleiner was Ms. Pao.
The danger in a no-holds-barred approach, of course, is that it also serves to tarnish Kleiner, which in its dot-com glory days used discretion to help perpetuate its mystique. Kleiner made fortunes in Netscape, Genentech, Amazon and Google, but has not had a huge name-brand hit recently.
Women might not kill the buzz, as Ms. Pao says she was told, but messy court cases sure do.
“It is very rare that an individual discrimination case reaches a jury, in Silicon Valley or elsewhere,” said Melinda S. Riechert, a high-tech employment lawyer with Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. “Most cases settle.”
That does not seem likely to happen here. At a hearing this month, Lynne C. Hermle, a lawyer for Kleiner, said a mediation attempt accomplished little.
“To say it was unproductive would be an understatement,” Ms. Hermle said.
Correction: February 24, 2015
An article on Monday about a pending sex discrimination suit against the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers described the potential outcome of the case incorrectly. The jury will determine civil liability; it cannot deliver a “guilty verdict.”
Qualified women are abandoning the tech industry in droves
An already dire shortage of qualified tech workers will grow worse if women leave the field
Women in tech say filling the pipeline of talent won't do much good if women keep quitting
Ana Redmond launched into a technology career for an exciting challenge and a chance to change the world. She was well-equipped to succeed too: An ambitious math and science wiz, she could code faster, with fewer errors, than anyone she knew.
In 2011, after 15 years, she left before achieving a management position.
Garann Means became a programmer for similar reasons. After 13 years, she quit too, citing a hostile and unwelcoming environment for women.
Neither expects to ever go back.
"There are a lot of things that piled up over the years," Means said. "I didn't know how to move forward. There was a lot I had to put up with in the culture of tech. It just didn't seem worth it."
That's a huge problem for the tech economy. According to the industry group Code.org, computing jobs will more than double by 2020, to 1.4 million. If women continue to leave the field, an already dire shortage of qualified tech workers will grow worse. Last summer, Google, Facebook, Apple and other big tech companies released figures showing that men outnumbered women 4 to 1 or more in their technical sectors.
It's why the industry is so eager to hire women and minorities. For decades tech companies have relied on a workforce of whites and Asians, most of them men.
Plenty of programs now encourage girls and minorities to embrace technology at a young age. But amid all the publicity for those efforts, one truth is little discussed: Qualified women are leaving the tech industry in droves.
Women in tech say filling the pipeline of talent won't do much good if women keep quitting — it's like trying to fill a leaking bucket.
"It's a really frustrating thing," said Laura Sherbin, director of research at the Center for Talent Innovation. "The pipeline may not improve much unless women can look ahead and see it's a valuable investment."
A Harvard Business Review study from 2008 found that as many as 50% of women working in science, engineering and technology will, over time, leave because of hostile work environments.
The reasons are varied. According to the Harvard study, they include a "hostile" male culture, a sense of isolation and lack of a clear career path. An updated study in 2014 found the reasons hadn't significantly changed.
Most women in the Harvard study said the attitudes holding them back are subtle, and hence more difficult to challenge.
Redmond, now 40, didn't want to leave her tech career. But she felt stuck, with no way to advance. She said male co-workers seemed to oppose her. "It was like they were trying to push me out at every stage," she said.
She had built a prototype for a travel website, she said, a feature to auto-suggest cities and airports based on the first three letters typed into the search field, fixing a long-standing problem.
Her male bosses told her she'd built it without permission. Then they said only architects within the company could pitch features — and all the architects were male. In the end, the project was handed to someone else, and she was assigned to less interesting tasks.
"They just kept asking me to prove myself over and over again," she said.
As an isolated incident, Redmond wouldn't have thought much of it. But she noticed a pattern. She said she was often passed up for no apparent reason, and her projects were frequently taken away or dismissed.
Tracy Chou, 27, a well-known engineer at Pinterest, said she was once bypassed at a previous start-up because her boss thought a new male hire was more qualified. When Chou pressed for an explanation, she recalled him saying: "It's just this feeling I have that this person will be able to get stuff done faster than you."
"The continuous pattern of all these people treating me like I didn't know what was going on, or excluding me from conversations and not trusting my assertions, all these things added up and it felt like there was an undercurrent of sexism," she said.
That's one difficulty in tackling the problem, said Alaina Percival of Women Who Code, a group that aims to attract more women to the tech industry.
"They're [things that are] so small you'd never even complain about them," Percival said. "But they happen day after day. They're the kind of things that separate and exclude you from the team and make you say, 'Hey, is this the right career path for me?'"
It's not just employees. Female tech entrepreneurs face similar frictions.
Wayne Sutton, a partner at BuildUp, a start-up that seeks out companies founded by women and minorities, says he often sees women treated unfairly. He recently watched a woman introduce herself to a venture capitalist only to be told that she should get a job instead of starting her own business "because you're not going to make it here."
"Situations like that can really hurt the confidence of any entrepreneur," Sutton said. "Some people will argue if you're going to be an A+ entrepreneur, you're not going to let it bother you. But it's really unnecessary behavior."
So far, no company has found a solution for retaining women.
Google, whose engineering workforce is only 17% female, introduced a training program in 2013 that aims to fight cultural biases. Employees play word association games, and are often surprised by how quickly they link engineering and coding professions with men, and less technical jobs with women.
Pinterest's technical team is 21% female. It created an engineering promotion committee to ensure no one is overlooked. Gender, race, ethnicity and the like aren't given special priority, but the committee is charged with making sure those issues don't get in the way of advancement. The company also has a recruiter whose focus is diversity.
Facebook, with a technical workforce that is 15% female, gathers its female employees from around the world for a leadership day filled with talks, workshops and support. Women also organize themselves into Facebook groups to share knowledge and experiences. The company also offers special benefits like four months of paid maternity and paternity leave, and free classes for women on returning to the workplace.
Apple's global engineering workforce is 20% female. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
Sensitivity training, mentoring, instruction in negotiating tactics and other "incremental" measures won't boost the numbers, said Joan C. Williams, law professor at UC Hastings College of the Law and coauthor of "What Works for Women: Four Patterns Working Women Need to Know."
Companies need to research the biases that prevent women from getting ahead, she said, and then devise "interrupters." Instead of single training sessions, companies need to make systemic changes, she said.
One example: Google's own data showed women were promoted less often than men because workers need to nominate themselves. Women who did so got pushback. Based on her studies, Williams found that women are rewarded for modesty and penalized for what men might see as "aggressive" behavior. Google began including female leaders at workshops to coach everyone — men and women — on how to promote themselves effectively. The gender difference among nominees disappeared, Williams said.
Although high-profile women such as Yahoo's Marissa Mayer, Hewlett-Packard's Meg Whitman and IBM's Ginni Rometty mark glass-ceiling victories for women, most tech companies are headed by men.
And simply having a female CEO does not in itself solve the problem. Men are crucial for creating an environment where women thrive, said Scarlett Sieber, 27, vice president of operations at tech company Infomous.
"Men need to be the ones that are advocating and pushing for women to rise up, and not just rely on the 1% of women who are already at the top to do it," Sieber said.
Sieber says the entire industry needs to do what it's so good at: cause disruption.
Until then, women like Redmond and Means will keep leaving. Redmond now runs her own business making educational apps for children, while Means, 36, has moved to Rome to work on a novel and figure out what she'll do next.
When asked what it would take to bring her back to the tech industry, Means laughs and says, "Everything." Then, "The main thing would be professionalism. Just being able to treat each other with respect would be huge."
