Of the few women I encountered at or above my professional level, almost none had young families. One partner told me that when she happily announced her third pregnancy, a male senior partner responded, “I don’t know any professional working woman who has three kids.”

When I gave birth to my first child, some partners at work treated my taking maternity leave as the equivalent of abandoning a ship in the middle of a typhoon to get a manicure. Juliet de Baubigny, one of the partners who had helped recruit me, had warned me that taking time off would put my companies at risk of being commandeered by another partner. I knew two other women who had board seats taken away during their maternity leaves. Juliet coached me on how to keep at least one company by leading their search for a CEO even though technically I was on leave. I’d arranged to take four months off, but after three I felt pressure to return.

Back at Kleiner, I continued to have a huge problem with Ajit. Not only was he blocking my work, he had been promoted to a position of even greater responsibility and was giving me negative reviews. I started to lodge formal complaints about him. In response, the firm suggested I transfer to the China office.

It wasn’t until the spring of 2011 that I finally told a few colleagues about my harassment by Ajit. One instructed me never to mention it again. But when I told fellow junior partner Trae Vassallo, she grew uncharacteristically quiet. Then she said something I never expected: She had been harassed by Ajit, too. He’d asked her out for drinks to talk shop, and in the course of the evening he started touching her with his leg under the table. Then I said something I still feel bad about. I recommended that she not report it. I had, and had been paying the price ever since.

Fortunately, Trae didn’t take my advice. She reported Ajit’s behavior soon after, when she found out he was about to do her review. She was promised that the firm would keep an eye on it, but no other action was taken.

In that round of summer reviews, Kleiner had six junior partners who had worked there for four or more years. The women had twice as many years at Kleiner, but only the men got promoted.

Around the end of November, Ajit persuaded Trae to go to New York with him for an important work trip. He said they’d be having dinner with a CEO who might be able to help one of Trae’s companies. But when they arrived, Trae saw that the table was set for two. The trip was just her and Ajit, in a hotel together for the weekend. Later that night he came to her room in his bathrobe, asking to be let in. She eventually had to push him out the door. Later, when she told one of the managing partners about the fake trip, he said, “You should feel flattered.”

It was now clear to me that the firm was unwilling to take the difficult actions needed to fix its problems. On January 4, 2012, I sent an email to the managing partners presenting all the facts as clearly as I could and asking for substantive changes and either protection from further ostracism or help with an exit.

After more than a month, the company put Ajit on leave. Two tense months after that, he finally left. When I spoke to the COO, he asked how much I wanted in order to quietly leave. “I want no less than what Ajit gets,” I said — which I suspected was around $10 million. The COO gasped.

Life at Kleiner got progressively worse. At one point I found out the partners had taken some CEOs and founders on an all-male ski trip. They spent $50,000 on the private jet to and from Vail. I was later told that they didn’t invite any women because women probably wouldn’t want to share a condo with men.

Finally, an outside independent investigator looked into Trae’s complaint and the issues I’d raised in my memo. Almost all of the women came to me after their interviews with him and said the same thing: “He really didn’t ask questions. He asked if we had ever seen porn in the office.” He didn’t seem interested in finding out about actual discrimination, bias, or harassment.

In my own interview, when I mentioned that my colleagues had talked about a porn star when we were on a plane together, the investigator asked if it was Sasha Grey. I said no. He pressed the point, saying that Sasha Grey was crossing over into legitimate acting. At another point, the investigator asked, in a ­“gotcha” tone, “Well, if they look down on women so much, if they block you from opportunities, they don’t include you at their events, why do they even keep you around in the first place?”

I hadn’t thought about it before. I replied slowly as the answer crystallized in my mind: If you had the opportunity to have workers who were overeducated, underpaid, and highly experienced, whom you could dump all the menial tasks you didn’t want to do on, whom you could get to clean up all the problems, and whom you could create a second class out of, wouldn’t you want them to stay?

I noticed he didn’t write that down in his notebook. Among the other things the investigator did not write down: that there was no sexual-harassment training, not even a line in the hiring paperwork saying: Hey, be appropriate. Don’t do things that make people feel uncomfortable. Don’t touch people. Kleiner’s managing partners flouted hiring rules, too, asking inappropriate questions in interviews like: Are you married? Do you have kids? How old are you? Are you thinking about having kids? What does your husband do? What did your ex-husband do? It was noted at some point that such questions created a giant legal risk, and the response was, effectively, Well, who’s going to sue us?