Ellen Pao, current interim CEO of Reddit and former partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, lost her gender discrimination lawsuit against her previous employer late last week. The jury found in Kleiner’s favor in all four claims she brought against the firm.

That said, Pao’s case was never meant to just litigate the specific things she endured as a woman in the male-dominated world of tech. In exposing them this way, Pao may have become that world’s Anita Hill. Her testimony about sexism in the workplace may not have brought down her target in court, but it may spark cultural change.

The discrimination she described was less the butt slaps and sexual overtures of Hill’s era, which she spoke of at the confirmation hearing for now-Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. This wasn’t about men outright telling women to keep out of the annals of power in a blatantly sexist manner. It was about the more subtle, even unconscious barriers working women face today.

Pao spoke openly about how she sought to shine a spotlight on the bias that pervaded her workplace and, in turn, the supposed meritocracy of the industry. She told the jury that the firm “was not going to change unless I pushed it” and she didn’t want to “let women be at risk and treated unfairly.” When asked by a juror why she didn’t opt to go through mediation instead of the trial, she responded, “I wanted an open courtroom where I could tell my story.”

What Pao described at Kleiner Perkins was a culture of different standards for men and women who worked at the firm. She says that women were asked to do the “office housework” of taking meeting notes. Much was made of her inability to “own the room” during meetings, getting criticized for not speaking up enough, but then was also being penalized for trying too hard to get ahead by demanding credit and jockeying for the right position. She says she was taking out of the running for a board position because she was on maternity leave and was told she had to “be one of the boys” to get ahead—and then the boys excluded the girls from things like client ski trips.