Mary Meeker testifies: The more women, the better

Elizabeth Weise | USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — Having women on teams is crucial to making the best decisions, and the more women there are, the better those decisions will be, Mary Meeker said from the stand Monday in the Ellen Pao gender bias trial.

"Two women are more powerful than one, three are more powerful than two and four are more powerful than three – if you have the right people in the room," said Meeker, one of the most powerful women currently working in venture capital.

Meeker is a senior partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture capital firm Pao is suing for $16 million on the basis of sex discrimination and retaliation.

Much of the now 3-week-old trial has been taken up with descriptions of slights Pao alleges she underwent at Kleiner, slights she says were due to a bias against women at the powerful Menlo Park, Calif. firm.

Meeker, who was dubbed "Queen of the Internet" by Barron's magazine, said, "Kleiner Perkins is the best place to be a woman in the business."

She listed several women she enjoyed working with at Kleiner, including Beth Seidenberg, Juliet de Baubigny, Susan Biglieri and Christina Lee.

Diversity "is extremely helpful in making decisions. When you have people from all disciplines, all walks of life, it helps you make better decisions and gives you different perspectives," she said.

Gender diversity, however, wasn't widespread at Kleiner in 2012 when Pao left the firm.

On cross-examination, Pao's lawyer Alan Exelrod noted that when Meeker joined the firm there were only three senior female investing partners, Lee, Seidenberg and herself.

Senior investing partners make many times more than junior investing partners because they receive a share of the profits from investments made by the partnership.

Many junior partners are brought into the firm but few are promoted to the level of senior investing partner. Most spend several years there gaining experience and then move on to either other venture capital firms or to running companies.

Currently, two of Kleiner's seven senior partners are women. However the firm has reduced the number of senior partners over the past two years.

There were three female and 11 male senior investing partners at Kleiner in October of 2012, the firm confirmed.

Solange Charas, a human capital expert and CEO of Charas Consulting in New York City, said a forensic analysis of Kleiner's promotion rates from junior or to senior investor in the years Pao was employed there wouldn't be hard to do.

"They're not a huge firm. They could easily track the promotion rate of women compared to men and that would give us a better view of whether they're biased," she said.

Exelrod also asked Meeker whether she took part in meetings in which the partnership decided to promote three men – Chi-Hua Chien, Wen Hsieh and Amol Deshpande – but not to promote two women, Pao and Trae Vassallo.

Meeker said she was in meetings where it was discussed but didn't recall being in a meeting where the final decision was made.

However, when Exelrod asked her if there was any reason other than merit that they were promoted, she said no.