Another parable from Silicon Valley’s uneven undercurrents emerged from beneath the surface this week. A former executive at the San Francisco based FinTech startup Carta is bringing a lawsuit against the company alleging, amongst other claims, gender discrimination.

Emily Kramer, the plaintiff, released a statement which can be found here. A quick bulleted summary from her statement pulls out some (but not all) of the facts:

• Emily was Carta’s most recent VP of Marketing and resigned from the company toward the end of 2019
• She built Carta’s marketing team from 2-30 & reported to the company’s CEO, Henry Ward
• There were no other women on the executive team
• Her marketing team led a popular Gap Table initiative which called attention to the gender equity gap across technology startups
• This initiative also highlighted Carta’s own shortfalls in female representation at the employee, executive, and board level
• She alleges she was underpaid relative to her executive peers in both cash & equity compensation
• There was a disagreement with the CEO during a 1×1 where, amongst other things, she alleges he called her “an asshole”
• This 1×1 caused her to resign shortly thereafter

The challenge of understanding these stories in full are, first and foremost, that they’re incomplete. From the outside looking in it’s hard to determine the dynamics of the workplace at Carta, the relationship between the executive & the CEO, what led to that penultimate conversation, and so on.

We won’t do that because we can’t. Instead, there are some assumptions to be called out to extrapolate a lesson from this saga:

• There is a broad & consistent gender imbalance across the technology industry
• A startup like Carta is well positioned to help promote the closing of this gap
• Carta’s CEO allegedly had an uncomfortable 1×1 with a female executive leading her to resign
• She had a poor enough employment experience to later bring a lawsuit against the company

Speaking of parables, do you know the parable of the boiling of the frog? As the story goes, if you keep a frog in water long enough and slowly increase the temperature of the water it won’t jump out and will boil to death. It won’t notice the slow steady increase of the perceived danger. The lesson? Beware of gradual change that creeps up on you and leads to an inevitable unhappy conclusion.

A lesson to glean from this lawsuit is that there is an ever present boiling trend of gender inequality and, in order to reverse this trend, accomplished women like Emily Kramer need to find success and grow in roles at well funded fast growing startups. It’s a core responsibility of the employer (and CEO) to create a culture of inclusiveness that facilitates communication and collaboration across gender and other diversity lines. Less name calling might help too.

In the years and decades ahead, successful companies individually and collectively will be the ones that take the time and have the discipline to build an inclusive record. We should all ask ourselves how we can help recruit, promote, and recognize more women in our companies to pull them up the proverbial ladder. More brains with different perspectives on more problems.

The most important thing is not what happened in that meeting. It’s that Carta and many many other companies have a lot of work to do to fix gender imbalance across all levels of their team. Pretty interesting that the Carta executive team isn’t listed on their website..

Equitability, like the long moral arc of the universe, bends toward inevitability. Just wait, you’ll see.