Ellen Pao, Anita Hill talk discrimination
The day after Bill O’Reilly was pushed out of Fox News amid allegations that he sexually harassed several colleagues, two women who rose to national prominence for challenging powerful men called for reform — and transparency — in how institutions handle issues of sexual assault, harassment and discrimination.
Anita Hill, whose dayslong testimony against nowSupreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was televised nationally in 1991, directed national attention to the issue of sexual harassment in a way that few at the time had seen before. Hill claimed Thomas had harassed her with explicit suggestions of sexual acts after she refused to date him. The justice has denied the allegations.
Ellen Pao, a venture capitalist and diversity advocate at Kapor Capital, sued her former employer, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, for gender discrimination in a highly publicized case. She lost the suit against the venture firm, which denied Pao’s allegations.
Speaking at San Francisco’s Nourse Theater on Thursday, Hill and Pao said the timing of their talk was not lost on them. The event was hosted by Kapor Center for Social Impact, a diversity in technology organization.
“Fox News made a decision to tolerate Bill O’Reilly’s behavior, and even to spend a certain amount of money to keep it quiet,” Hill said. “So the first thing is that there has to be transparency in whatever process you have. There has to be a productive investigation.”
Hill, now a professor at
Brandeis University, said the O’Reilly incident should be used as a case study in teaching workplaces, schools, government bodies and other such institutions “what not to do” when investigating claims of discrimination or harassment.
“One of the things that happens with investigations is women go in and make a complaint, and the investigation is not inclusive because you don’t have a transparent system and you don’t know, maybe, about some other complaints that have been filed against the person,” Hill said. “There’s no established pattern, so every individual has to fight their case all on its own like it’s a new problem.”
This month, a New York Times investigation found that O’Reilly had settled with five women who said the television host had harassed them.
Nine months earlier, Roger Ailes, the founding chairman of Fox News, was also ousted amid claims that he had sexually harassed several women at the network. Ailes pocketed a $40 million package upon his departure.
Together, the departures of Ailes and O’Reilly may cost the network’s parent company, 21st Century Fox, as much as $65 million. O’Reilly is receiving as much as $25 million.
Ailes and O’Reilly both deny the allegations.
“As all this evidence starts to accumulate, you’ve got to be willing to make hard decisions. Now Fox made a hard decision to end the relationship with O’Reilly,” Hill said. “However, before they did that, they signed a contract with him to pay him millions of dollars, and now they’re paying him millions of dollars to exit, when, in fact, he should have not been granted the contract because the evidence (of harassment) was clear.”
More than two decades passed between when Hill sat before a congressional committee and when Pao took the stand in a San Francisco courtroom.
Yet the women said their experiences were strikingly similar.
Both were ultimately unsuccessful. In 1991, Thomas, who compared the allegations against him to a “high-tech lynching,” was confirmed to the Supreme Court, despite Hill’s testimony. In 2015, Pao lost her lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins.
Both felt as though their stories were dismissed and ignored by powerful people and institutions.
Hill and Pao said that after they spoke out, they heard from countless other women from across the country who said they, too, had experienced discrimination, harassment or worse. Though their time in the public eye has been difficult, both said they would do it again.
“When it was just about me, I thought, ‘I’ll just work harder, I’ll do better,’ ” Pao said. “But when I saw (discrimination) was clearly happening to other women in the firm and there was this harassment element to it, I felt like somebody had to be held accountable.”
Hill’s testimony set off a wave of mandatory sexual-harassment training in workplaces around the nation. But, the women said, sexual harassment and issues of gender bias are too commonly discussed in the abstract.
According to data from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, charges of sex discrimination make up nearly 30 percent of the complaints it receives annually. In 2016, the federal agency received nearly 13,000 allegations of sexual harassment from American workers, though studies have shown that exponentially more cases go unreported.
Toward the end of the evening, members of the audience were asked to raise their hands if they knew of someone in their own lives who has been sexually harassed at work. Nearly every hand in the auditorium, filled with 1,650 people, shot into the air.
“Wow,” a man in the crowd said. “There it is.”
“There has to be transparency in whatever process you have. There has to be a productive investigation.” Anita Hill, talking about Fox News and Bill O’Reilly