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Ellen Pao joined Kleiner Perkins in 2005 as chief of staff to John Doerr, became a junior investing partner, and sued the firm in 2012 for gender discrimination and retaliation. Her evidence included all-male ski trips and dinners, and being passed over for senior partner. In 2015 a San Francisco jury found for Kleiner on all four claims, but the public trial exposed how the partnership operated and prompted wider scrutiny of tech's treatment of women.
In a venture partnership, promotion depends on having deals attributed to you, and attribution is settled informally by senior partners rather than by who sourced or diligenced the deal. Someone outside the social inner circle can do the work and still see board seats and credit go to insiders. Because the credit record is itself produced by the exclusionary network, the resulting track-record gap later justifies not promoting them.
Men-only dinners, ski trips and after-hours gatherings are not side perks. They are where relationships with founders and co-investors form and where deal flow is exchanged. Excluding women from these events on social grounds, such as the claim that they would 'kill the buzz', excludes them from the firm's actual economic machinery while formal policies look neutral.
Pao describes performance feedback that faulted women as too quiet and then as too aggressive, while praising the same assertiveness in men. When the target behavior shifts with the evaluator's comfort, subjective reviews become a flexible tool for denying advancement. They also leave a documented paper trail that makes the denial look merit-based.