VC firms hire women to ‘clean up all the problems’

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Ellen Pao leaves the California Superior Court Civic Center Courthouse during a lunch break from her trial on March 10, 2015 in San Francisco, California.

In a lengthy essay published this week by New York Magazine’s The Cut, Pao reflects on her decision to bring the suit and its effect on her career and personal life.

She also parses an unsettling paradox: Why do venture capital firms hire female employees, only to prevent them from advancing professionally?

When Pao described the types of discrimination she had witnessed and experienced at Kleiner Perkins to an outside independent investigator, the investigator asked her, “Well, if they look down on women so much, if they block you from opportunities, they don’t include you at their events, why do they even keep you around in the first place?”

Pao considered the question carefully. She writes:

The answer crystallized in my mind. If you had the opportunity to have workers who were overeducated, underpaid and highly experienced, whom you could dump all the menial tasks you didn’t want to do on, whom you could get to clean up all the problems, and whom you could create a second class out of, wouldn’t you want them to stay?

Senior partners at venture capital firms — and Silicon Valley managers more broadly — profit from keeping women around but on the sidelines, she explains. In her time at the firm, Pao writes that she found that “the women had twice as many years at Kleiner, but only the men got promoted.”

She cites the example of a discrimination lawsuit filed by a female employee of Facebook, who says she was “given menial tasks like serving drinks to the men on the team.”