Tech’s concept of 'culture fit’ and the Ellen Pao trial

Ellen Pao during a brief statement after finding out that she lost her lawsuit against her former employer venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Byers & Caufield at the San Francisco Superior Court in San Francisco on march 27th 2015. less Ellen Pao during a brief statement after finding out that she lost her lawsuit against her former employer venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Byers & Caufield at the San Francisco Superior Court in San ... more Photo: Sam Wolson, Special To The Chronicle Photo: Sam Wolson, Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 10 Caption Close Tech’s concept of 'culture fit’ and the Ellen Pao trial 1 / 10 Back to Gallery

From the first day in court, it was evident that venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers was not the only party on trial in the gender discrimination suit against it.

Ellen Pao, the former junior partner suing the firm, was also on trial. Whether her personality “fit” with the Kleiner Perkin’s culture was a question debated with as much relevance as the culture at the firm itself.

This proved a winning strategy: The defense argued that Pao was “entitled,” “territorial” and self-serving, partners testified she lacked “chemistry” with colleagues, and on Friday a jury issued Kleiner Perkins a sweeping victory.

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“Her personality didn’t fit in with this particular firm,” defense expert witness Michael Robbins told the jury. Pao smiled pleasantly through most of it, perhaps an attempt to deflect her detractors.

Kleiner Perkins built its case around “culture fit” — a jargony shorthand for whether an employee reflects a company’s values.

But culture fit can also function as a thinly veiled cover for bias.

It was up to jurors to distinguish which definition was in play.

“Culture fit suffers from the same delusions as 'pattern matching,’” said Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, referencing another loaded Silicon Valley buzzword. “You tell yourself you’re being objective as you wind up reproducing your own tribe.”

The idea of culture fit entered the American corporate lexicon in the 1980s. With the U.S. in a recession and Asia in an economic boom, businesses became obsessed with replicating Japanese management styles that stressed workplace culture, not just the bottom line. Simultaneously, the influential book “Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life,” published in 1982, proposed that a good corporate culture can be the key to success. By the late 1980s, a body of academic work had emerged, demonstrating that an employee’s cultural fit could be more consequential than skills.

Jennifer Chatman, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, researches how cultural fit can be used to build companies where employees are united around the same corporate mission and values — and therefore, the thinking goes, more productive.

“I’m on a quest to make culture fit a meaningful construct,” she said. “The idea of culture fit can be deliberately different from hiring people that are homogenous. That said, I’m an idealistic researcher. It’s true out there this concept can be used to justify bias.”

Even before the phrase culture fit was used, the tech industry had strong ideas about what types of employees fit in.

Through the 1970s, said Illinois Institute of Technology historian Marie Hicks, female programmers were openly expected to quit their jobs when they married. Her mother was at IBM when she was told to resign upon her engagement. So Hicks’ mother pretended to break it off.

“Historically, culture fit has meant straight, or straight-acting, white men: those for (and by) whom the social contract was written,” said Hicks. “Culture fit masks a host of unconscious biases that, if openly articulated, would be illegal under civil rights and labor protection laws.”

At its most basic, culture fit is about hiring employees that fit a certain mold. The challenge is whether that mold is job-related, or hinged on bias instead. Was Pao’s personality not a reflection of the firm’s values? Or did she simply not fit neatly into a biased construct of what a good venture capitalist looks like — someone like the “white, male nerds who dropped out of Harvard and Stanford,” who senior partner John Doerr once said seem to correlate with success?

A jury found that Pao was fired because she was a poor fit for Kleiner Perkins.

But in the venture capital industry — where women account for just 6 percent of senior partners and 77 percent of firms have never had a female partner — the idea of what a “good fit” is can still be tainted by bias.

“For some people, culture fit is just a way of saying 'no —holes,’” said Nunberg. “But it’s also become a way of reproducing one’s own cultural group, a pretext for leaving others out.”

Kristen V. Brown is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: kbrown@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @kristenvbrown