Ellen Pao, a tech investor and former CEO of the social media company Reddit, caught everyone’s attention in 2012 when she filed a gender discrimination suit against her employer at the time, the venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Silicon Valley was captivated by her accusations that her superiors didn’t promote her because of her gender and then retaliated when she complained.
Pao lost the case, but the impact has been a lasting one. She has led the charge in taking Silicon Valley to task for its systemic sexism.
“It was started by a group of white men who came out of the semiconductor industry. They hired a bunch of their friends who were white men, and all of a sudden that became the model,” she said in an interview with KQED.
Pao wrote a book, “Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change,” that chronicled the details of her lawsuit and the aftermath.
Pao is the middle of three children of Taiwanese immigrant parents. She first learned to code at the age of ten from her mother, who was an engineer in computer sciences. She majored in electrical engineering at Princeton and then earned degrees in business and law from Harvard.
Pao began her career as a corporate attorney, worked at WEBTV, and held several positions in Silicon Valley companies, including Senior Director of Corporate Business Development at BEA Systems.
After leaving Kleiner Perkins, she joined Reddit as the Head of Business Development and Strategic Partnership. In 2014, Pao was named interim CEO, and in one of the largest changes made to the site, promptly banned “revenge porn,” the non-consensual release of intimate images and video to harass and humiliate someone, often by a former romantic partner. She subsequently was attacked by Reddit trolls for cracking down on harassment in Reddit communities, which led to the banning of several hate-based subreddits, and received negative feedback for the firing of the director of talent. She resigned in July 2015.
Since then, Pao has co-founded and is CEO of the non-profit Project Include, which focuses on lasting diversity and inclusion in the tech industry by using metrics and data. She continues to write and speak out against sexism and discrimination in the tech industry.