In that case, too, the accuser did not prevail; Mr. Thomas, the man alleged to have sexually harassed Ms. Hill, was elevated to, and remains on, the Supreme Court. And yet, “In that case, what happened was a public discourse began about issues that people had previously wrestled with privately,” said Ms. Klein.

The Kleiner-Pao trial has prompted a similar discussion because the series of large and small slights that Ms. Pao contends she suffered at the hands of her male colleagues and bosses at Kleiner has resonated with women across the industry, and it has turned a light on problems that many men around here have long kept under wraps.

“Ellen’s experiences rang true,” Ms. Klein said. “They struck a chord.”

Ms. Pao is far from the first woman in the tech industry to allege discrimination in the workplace. But she has a résumé — with three Ivy League degrees and a string of executive jobs — that put her in a rarefied position.

As one of the few women admitted into the venture capital industry, she gained entree into an upper echelon where most women stay silent when they experience wrongdoing for fear of being shut out of the industry entirely.

As a consequence, though many women in the tech industry have stories similar to Ms. Pao’s, they are rarely heard from.

“What usually happens when you have something like this happen to you at work is that you negotiate a settlement with a gag order,” said Melinda Byerley, a marketing consultant who has worked in the tech industry for more than a decade. “They pay you to be quiet. This happens all over Silicon Valley — they will write you a severance agreement outlining X number of months’ salary, X number of shares, and along with that is a gag order.”

She added: “This is how women have been doing this for more than a decade. This is tribal knowledge. It’s shared from one woman to the next.” What made Ms. Pao’s story unusual, Ms. Byerley said, was her refusal to take the quiet settlement, despite the risks to her reputation and her career.