Palo Alto, Calif.


MEN invented the Internet. And not just any men. Men with pocket protectors. Men who idolized Mr. Spock and cried when Steve Jobs died. Nerds. Geeks. Give them their due. Without men, we would never know what our friends were doing five minutes ago.


But are these men trapped in the past even as they create the future?


That’s the debate that has sprung up here since Ellen Pao, a junior partner in her early 40s at the distinguished venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, filed a sexual discrimination lawsuit against the company and her colleagues there.


The complaint, laced with accusations of professional retaliation after spurned sexual advances, has riveted Silicon Valley, whose venture capitalists generally prefer media attention for their businesses and deals, not themselves. Instead of talking about the New New Thing, people are discussing an old, old problem. And they are taking sides.


Although the accusations have yet to be heard in court, even some of Ms. Pao’s critics concede that she is exposing an uncomfortable truth about Silicon Valley: starting tech companies in 2012 is still a male game, and so is funding them.


Her complaint goes further. It depicts venture capitalists here as a group of 21st-century men who may be hard at work building the 22nd century but, when it comes to dealing with women in the workplace, are stuck firmly in the caveman era — or at least in the 1950s. It’s a portrait that many women in tech find all too familiar.


 “You talk to any woman in technology and she will have a personal story or know a story where she felt conscious of her gender in subtle or significant ways,” said Kathy Savitt, 48, the chief executive of the social commerce start-up Lockerz. Sometimes, she said, it’s as mild as realizing, “I’m the only chick in the room.” Other times, “it’s a lack of relevance, a feeling you can see an end to your opportunities.”


 With the number of women in Silicon Valley so meager, a prominent discrimination lawsuit does not surprise Ms. Savitt. This place runs into trouble with women on a regular basis, most memorably in recent years when the C.E.O. of Hewlett-Packard resigned after inappropriate conduct with a former reality TV actress who was working for him.


Still, Ms. Pao’s lawsuit has injected talk of sexual politics into a conversation that generally sticks to money and eyeballs and business plans, monetization and enlightenment of the masses. Men in Silicon Valley may not behave any worse than men anywhere else, but people here like to think it’s all a meritocracy.


The shock really stems from where the scandal is taking place. Ms. Savitt knows Kleiner well; the firm is financing Lockerz. She cannot comment on the suit but expresses her deep admiration for the Kleiner crew. The firm is one of the few exceptions to the venture world’s disinterest in hiring women. A quarter of its 50 partners are female.


That fact fits awkwardly with the lawsuit’s claim that one male executive, Randy Komisar, told Ms. Pao that women would never succeed at Kleiner “because women are quiet.” Another male executive, Chi-Hua Chien, is quoted in the suit saying women were not being invited to a big-deal dinner because they would “kill the buzz.”


Neither Ms. Pao nor any of the parties mentioned in the lawsuit would comment on it.


Kleiner is an unlikely defendant for another reason. It is particularly conscious of its image. “As Kleiner Perkins sees it, the Florence of the Renaissance had the Medicis, the American steel industry had the House of Morgan, and Silicon Valley in the late 20th century has Kleiner Perkins,” David A. Kaplan wrote in “The Silicon Boys” in 1999.


That was when the firm was at its peak, the money behind Netscape, Genentech, Amazon and a little start-up called Google.


“If you believe every allegation in the complaint, it’s appalling and an important window into how the valley works,” Mr. Kaplan said. “But I’m somewhat skeptical. The clichés you hear in the valley are about the pranks, the obsessiveness, the Foosball tables. You don’t really hear about randiness and mistreatment of women. That doesn’t prove it’s not there, but that’s not the lore.”