Freada Kapor Klein

Freada Kapor Klein
Kapor Klein in 2011
Born	1952 (age 64–65) Kansas City, Missouri
Residence	Oakland, California, U.S.
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley (Criminology, 1974) Brandeis University (PhD, 1984)
Known for	Organizational development and human resources
Spouse(s)	Mitchell Kapor
Children	2

Freada Kapor Klein Ph.D. (born 1952) is a venture capitalist, social policy researcher and philanthropist. As a partner at Kapor Capital and the Kapor Center for Social Impact, she is known for efforts to diversify the technology workforce through activism and investments. Her 2007 book Giving Notice: Why the Best and the Brightest Leave the Workplace and How You Can Help Them Stay examines the reasons people have for leaving corporate America as well as the human and financial cost.

Klein first became a victims advocate in the 1970s. During this time, she noticed a widespread denial of the prevalence of sexual harassment and compared it to the silence surrounding rape that she had seen six years earlier. Kapor Klein's association with technology companies began when she started working for Lotus Software in 1984. In 2015, Benjamin Jealous called her "the moral center of Silicon Valley and an O.G. in technology".

Klein was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1952 and grew up in the San Fernando Valley with two older siblings. Her father was a chemical engineer attending medical school. Her mother was one of the few survivors of a Jewish family who fled Russia to escape pogroms. When applying to universities, Klein looked for places where there were high levels of student activism. Studying at the University of California, Berkeley, she volunteered at a rape crisis center and later interviewed rapists who were in prison. She graduated from Berkeley with a bachelor's degree in criminology in 1974 and founded the Alliance Against Sexual Coercion in 1976. This is considered to be the first organization in the United States to focus on preventing sexual harassment in the workplace. In 1984, Klein received a Ph.D. in social policy and research from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts with a Social Science Research Council fellowship for the study of sexual harassment in federal government employment.