but after breaking things off with him, multiple Kleiner Perkins partners and an outside human resources consultant allegedly ignored Pao’s complaints about repeated harassment and retaliation, and rejected her requests to transfer away from Nazre.
Having once been in a relationship with a person does not open the door to continued harassment after the relationship is over.
Where did you pull the false accusation / innocent or trivial incidents from?
And if may not be true in this case why bring it up?
She asked to be transferred away from him because of this and they ignored her, how much more insensitive could it get.
Even when you're in a relationship 'no' still means 'no' and 'leave me alone' still means just that.
Occam's razor and all that.
Harassment does happen, and in cases like this the person that steps up has enough problems on their hand without being dealt more crap.
The prior situation has no bearing on what she claims happened, it either did or it did not, and even if it did not the complaint should have been taken serious.
So we're not even getting to 'taking the complaints at face value', we're simply establishing that she claims that her complaints were ignored. That's a pretty low bar to have to jump over, if someone claims sexual harassment and you ignore them then you're simply wrong, regardless of whether or not the complaint is true.
If you sue McDonald's for food poisoning frivolously, have the bucks to do so, and are somehow immunized against a countersuit, there's no downside.
Pao, win or lose, is going to have a very different VC career than if she never filed suit. That's a pretty big downside.
But the unequal pay, promotions, projects, and participation? That is a rather unequivocal situation.
On the larger topic of sexual harassment, I often wonder if there should be a word for sexual harassment just as we have one for rape(where stop means stop). With sexual harassment, seemingly normal conversation could be construed as criminal.
Alas, don't shit where you eat.
If she is not bringing up the criminal angle, chances are she never pursued it or the DA passed on the case. That is not great news for her case.
Typically you do the civil case after the conclusion of the criminal one, especially if you are confident he will be found guilty.
Was thinking the same thing. Also a psychological component, intermittent reinforcement. She had rebuffed him and then agreed to have sex 2 or 3 times. Who knows over what period that happened and whether there was any rebuff in between the sexual events. After all, he persisted and to away with it at least one time after being rejected.
(Not agreeing his behavior was proper obviously just pointing this out.)
No.
Which means, no.
When she first said no, and he persisted, and then she acceded, she trained him into believing that persistence pays off. So when she says no again, it seems to me that it is almost mathematically predictable that he will re-double his persistent efforts to win her back.
'no means no' does not apply when it sometimes means yes. With added flakiness, 'no means no' means : 'no means yes once in a while, and no means no when I feel like it, and you're a rapist and I'm still an angel if you cannot figure it out'.