Emily Kramer, a former VP at equity management service Carta who oversaw publication of Silicon Valley gender-pay gap research, sues Carta over unequal pay
My experience as Carta's lone woman executive Lucinda Shen / Fortune : The executive who led Carta's gender-pay gap study is suing over gender discrimination David Pierce / Protocol : Your tech company needs a better climate plan Tweets: Emily Kramer / @emilykramer : Today I filed a lawsuit against my former employer, Carta, where I led marketing on the executive team for nearly 2 years. https://twitter.com/... Ellen Huet / @ellenhuet : Carta, which makes equity mgmt software, was all about “closing the gender equity gap” — published studies and hosted conference about it Now, the exec who oversaw those projects is suing them, saying she was paid less & given less stock than male peers: https://www.bloomberg.com/... Erin Griffith / @eringriffith : Carta, the $3bn startup known for its study on the disparity around equity given to women (the “gap table") gave its top female executive 1/3 the equity of her male peers https://medium.com/... Emily Best / @emilybest : Actually very seriously fuck you @cartainc. I want my name taken off your blog about the inequality women face in SV (though I'm sure that entire piece was Emily's idea) and I'm going to take my business elsewhere. I'm letting all 100+ advisors and investors know why. https://twitter.com/... @vcstarterkit : This lawsuit reads like a playbook of how to build a toxic culture and how to profit off of noble causes but not live up to them internally. A thread of some parts that stood out: https://twitter.com/... Jackie Luo / @jackiehluo : i admired carta a lot for their work on the equity gap. but in retrospect i shouldn't have been surprised that @EmilyKramer, who led that work at the company, received a third of the equity of her male colleagues. isn't that always how this story goes? https://medium.com/... Charity Majors / @mipsytipsy : Good for you, @emilykramer. Give em hell. https://medium.com/... Ellen K. Pao / @ekp : “I would realize that not only was Carta just another “boys-club” startup, but it didn't even manifest its own ideals inside its own walls.” Ex head of marketing outs Carta's hypocrisy. All tech CEOs should work on internal equity first https://medium.com/... Adam L. Penenberg / @penenberg : Oof. “For example, in our Series E pitch deck, one slide tried to equate mere wage-earning with ‘slavery’ and included illustrations of people actually working the fields. I explained repeatedly that this was inappropriate, triggering, and offensive.” https://twitter.com/... Kara Swisher / @karaswisher : Btw again and again, it is ALL about the cap table and who is sitting at it. Clue: Not many women, POC. Many white dudes, snarfing up all the good bits: Equity for all?. My experience as Carta's lone woman... | by Emily Kramer | Jul, 2020 | Medium https://medium.com/... @caraesten : I feel like most mission driven startups just turn out like this; there's no way to solve the problems of the system from within the system, especially while there's still a profit motive at play!!! https://twitter.com/... Erin Griffith / @eringriffith : “It's become increasingly clear that ‘mission-driven’ Silicon Valley companies are often built on hypocritical lies” https://twitter.com/... Melinda Byerley / @mjb_sf : Yet another A16Z shitshow https://twitter.com/... Halle Tecco / @halletecco : My brave friend @EmilyKramer has shared her—unfortunately all-to-common— negative experience as the sole woman exec at a venture-funded startup. This is the likability trap @AliciaMenendez speaks of. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The suit lands weeks after the Los Angeles Times collected [[a:955073|first-person accounts of discrimination and isolation from women, people of color, and LGBTQ tech workers]], part of the mid-2020 wave of internal reckonings rolling through Silicon Valley. What makes the Carta case stand out is the plaintiff: Emily Kramer wasn't an anonymous employee but the executive who ran marketing for nearly two years and oversaw publication of the company's own gender-pay gap research and its conference on closing the equity gap.
Per the allegations, Kramer was paid less than male peers and granted roughly a third of their equity — meaning a company whose brand was built on quantifying the pay gap is now the defendant in one. A month later, New York Times reporting would describe [[a:957369|Carta employees, most of them women, saying they were belittled, excluded from meetings, and punished for voicing concerns]], suggesting Kramer's suit was the visible edge of a broader internal problem.
First-order effects
- Kramer's claims move the dispute from Carta's published research into court, putting the company's pay and equity-grant practices under legal discovery while it simultaneously markets itself as a fixer of the gender equity gap.
- Carta's leadership must defend both the lawsuit and its DEI-branded conference-and-studies apparatus, which the suit directly contradicts — a credibility problem no PR response fully resolves.
Second-order effects
- Other current and former Carta employees have a template and a public forum: the New York Times account of belittled and sidelined women staff points toward further internal complaints, departures, or joined claims that raise the cost of settlement.
- Rival equity-management platforms now operate in the shadow of the case — any of them pitching 'fairness' tooling or publishing pay-gap research will be measured against whether their own cap tables and salaries survive the same scrutiny.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, startup DEI positioning becomes legally testable: publishing gap research or hosting equity conferences creates a documented baseline plaintiffs can cite, converting marketing claims into evidence in discrimination suits.
- The battleground shifts from salary alone to equity grants — the opaque, discretionary instrument where Kramer alleges the largest disparity — pressuring private companies to standardize how they allocate founder-era-style equity to executives.
The trend: Startup diversity branding is increasingly being litigated from the inside, as executives and employees use companies' own published equity research as the yardstick for discrimination claims.