At another point, after I had gone through all the problems with how other women and I were treated by Kleiner, 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 a bevy of workers who were overeducated, underpaid, and well experienced, that you could dump all the menial tasks you didn’t want to do on, that you could get to clean up all the problems, and that 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.