Lady Business: The vindication of Ellen Pao, and the "free speech" game

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the thirty-ninth issue, published August 16, 2018.
 

Clairvoyance and Consistency

 
The not-very-fun thing about working for a monthly magazine that publishes a big October issue is that this time of year -- when it feels like the rest of the world is on vacation -- is pretty crazed! I had a really excellent weekend involving Edna St. Vincent Millay and a runaway paddleboard, which I want to explain in a future Lady Business, but this week I wouldn’t do it justice.

Fortunately, the fun thing about working for a monthly magazine that also publishes a big September issue is that this is also the time of year when I get to show off work that mostly happened months ago.

Like my colleague Kimberly Weisul’s extensive, in-depth Q&A with Ellen Pao, the venture capitalist and former Reddit CEO whose gender-discrimination lawsuit against her VC employer blew the lid off just how screwed up and sexist Silicon Valley can be. Six years later, Pao told Weisul:
 

There are people who won't talk to me. There are people who believe the negative press campaign. A woman who runs a fund recently reached out to me, and she said, "I am sorry, because I really thought you were crazy when you sued. I see now why you did it and why it makes sense. I had pushed down all of my feelings and my experiences. I apologize, and I thank you for what you've done."
 
But this is six years after I sued, and she's finally saying something about it. There are still a lot of people who believe that I was wrong to sue. It's been such an uphill battle for so long. I don't know if I've come out the other side yet, where I can say it's been a positive. But it's been very rewarding to see so many other people speaking up, and to see that shift from doubt and skepticism into empathy and belief. That's happened in the past couple of years, and it's been such a relief. 

Pao, who’s now running the non-profit Project Include, focused on increasing diversity and inclusion at other startups, is a little more optimistic than I would expect about the situation facing women in Silicon Valley, after a year of #MeToo and many years of the widely-known problems that she helped expose.

I especially liked her response to Kimberly’s question about the supposed #MeToo backlash -- ie, that tiresome argument that speaking up about harassment won’t help women, it’ll just make men more reluctant to hire/promote/spend time alone with female employees. 

Pao was having none of that. When Kimberly raised the question of whether #MeToo helped or hurt women, she replied:
 

Of course it helped. People said the same thing about my lawsuit--that VCs would never hire another woman, that it was going to prevent people from meeting with women, and that it was going to destroy any kind of gender progress that had already been made. That's just sensationalistic--and also a little bit pissy, for lack of a better word. It's like, "We don't like this change, so we're going to dig in our heels."

 
(Please sign up for The Pissy VCs of Silicon Valley, the entry-level business-school course I’m teaching in my fictional-but-expanding college curriculum.)
 
I encourage you to read the entire Q&A, which I edited and which is one of the features in the September issue of Inc. Pao also discusses her time as the CEO of Reddit, why the big social-media and tech platforms have allowed the trolls to win -- and, importantly, schools us all on the right and wrong definitions of “free speech”:
 

The definition of free speech has become convoluted. It originally meant protection of the press from government intervention. Now it's come to mean that people should be able to say whatever they want on tech platforms, which are run by private companies. This idea, that private companies have this obligation to allow any kind of speech, is actually not something that is legally required.
 
Tech companies created some confusion early on, because a lot of founders used "free speech" as a marketing angle. "Express whatever ideas you want!" But when you make it a free-for-all, people unfortunately come out with their most terrible insults, and this horrible online harassment that we've seen get worse and worse over the past several years. 

 
(Adding Free Speech 101, the pre-law/common-sense seminar at Lady Business U!)
 
Or you could just give Alex Jones a weeklong time-out to reflect on what he’s done, and how he’s maybe, just a little, regularly breaking the rules that you and your buddies set up for the private users who elect to do business with your private corporation. Those are not rules that really have any relationship to, or protection by, the First Amendment.
 
But allowing a controversial firebrand to threaten the press with “battle rifles” – that’s almost like using your corporation to help “abridge the freedom of speech, or of the press,” isn’t it? So it sure is nice for Twitter that, all posturing about “consistency” aside, it doesn’t actually have to worry about protecting our First Amendment rights.
 
Programming note: Lady Business will be off next week. (See above re: October issue.) See you on August 30!
 
Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com