Former Theranos executive, Elizabeth Holmes.
By Annabelle Mackson ’23
Human Resources Coordinator & Staff Writer
Former executive Elizabeth Holmes is currently on trial for allegedly committing multiple counts of fraud through her health technology company, Theranos. Theranos claimed to produce a non-invasive medical device that would be able to complete rapid blood tests with a mere finger-prick of blood. According to Holmes, this was meant to be revolutionary, especially for disabled people or people with severe needle phobias.
Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 when she was just 19 years old, but it would take over ten years and billions of dollars for people to discover the truth behind both Holmes and the company. The smoking gun came in October of 2015, when The Wall Street Journal published an expose outlining Theranos’ medical claims and lack of transparency concerning the actual success of their operations. By the following October, Theranos had closed its labs and laid off a large number of their staff. Complete termination of the company came in 2018. After reviewing Holmes’ history and criminal allegations, I thought the case was fairly cut and dry against her in terms of morality, but one individual in particular seems determined to shift the conversation from Holmes’ alleged actions to her gender.
In September of 2021, investor and former CEO of Reddit Ellen Pao published an Opinion piece in The New York Times titled: “The Elizabeth Holmes Trial is a Wake-Up Call for Sexism in Tech.” The article claimed “it can be sexist to hold her accountable for alleged serious wrongdoing and not hold an array of men accountable for reports of wrongdoing or bad judgment,” and used examples of scandals at WeWork, Uber, Tesla and Facebook to prove their unpunished guilt. Initially, Pao’s support of Holmes is understandable given the rarity of female success in tech. Before her downfall, Holmes was the personification of a mainstream feminist girlboss: an incredibly successful and perfectly marketable woman in a male-dominated industry. Instead of shattering the glass ceiling, however, she weaponized it, equating reasonable criticisms of the Theranos device to sexism and misogyny. Holmes’ continuous manipulation of her own narrative as a technological entrepreneur surrounded by sexist men convinced other women that the stringent prosecution against her was due to her gender, and Ellen Pao is among them. The companies Pao names in her article have had their fair share of controversies, but her argument surrounding Holmes, sexism and accountability doesn’t hold up for a plethora of reasons. While she does compare Holmes’ charges to cases centered on male executives, I would have been far more sympathetic to her argument had they actually been legally related.
The two male-centric cases Pao specifies involve Kevin Burns and Elon Musk, the former chief executive of Juul and the CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX, respectively. Her first example shows that Burns was the incumbent chief executive at Juul when the company received its first volley of lawsuits regarding their alleged attempts to market their e-cigarettes to minors. However, the $40 million settlement Pao cites was agreed to this year, and Burns left Juul in September of 2019. In her second example, Pao references the securities fraud charge brought against Musk by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2018. Combined, Musk and Tesla had to pay $40 million in penalties, and Musk had to step down as Tesla’s Chairman for the time being. $40 million in penalties is a drop in the bucket for a billionaire like Musk, and could have aligned with the “hand slap” punishment Pao illustrates, but she neglects to mention that the SEC filed the complaint due to Musk tweeting about taking Tesla private and pricing investments at $420 a share. While this one comment did result in “significant market disruption” according to the SEC’s press release, anyone vaguely familiar with Musk’s antics knows this is not out of character, whether it’s defensible or not.
While I am in no way defending these men or their actions, the cases Pao references just don’t hold a candle to Holmes in terms of severity. Additionally, she never once specifies that the cases she exemplifies as men “getting away with murder” were civil cases, not criminal ones. Someone indicted in a civil case is ordered to pay damages and/or change the behavior that got them charged, while an individual indicted in a criminal case faces incarceration or probation depending on the severity of their infraction. The charges of wire fraud against Holmes make her case not only criminal, but federal as well. Pao’s false equivalency of these two very different forms of litigation creates a strawman argument designed to pull focus from the fact that Elizabeth Holmes is in the ninth week of her criminal trial. Pao also claims that holding Holmes accountable and acknowledging that such accountability is rooted in sexism can exist in tandem, but her article only pushes the latter of the two beliefs.
Men evade the law every day, as do women, and in some fields male indictment may be comparatively rare. This does not mean that it is sexist to focus on a woman doing the exact same crime, nor is it sexist to focus on that woman’s trial more than a man who might have done something bad but hasn’t been charged with anything. Feminism is about equality of the genders and sexes, and that applies to the law as well. The case of Holmes shows how that vision of equality can be altered to support prejudiced thinking all over again.