Is Reddit’s Ellen Pao just too radical for Silicon Valley’s unequal terrain?
An online petition to oust the CEO gained over 100,000 signatures this weekend. Has her fight against inequality made her too many enemies?
Another week, and another Silicon Valley-sized maelstrom. Ellen Pao, chief executive of
Reddit, the social news forum that bills itself as the front page of the internet (but is increasingly known for misogyny and porn), is under fire again. This time it follows the sudden departure of a popular employee at the site, which prompted volunteer moderators
to shut down hundreds of communities – sorry, subreddits – in protest. Reddit has been thrown into chaos and, although
Pao has apologised for “letting down” users, a
petition calling for her removal
– set up earlier this year by members unhappy at the company’s attempts to ban communities for harassing behaviour – has gained more than 100,000 signatures over the weekend.
Why is the world so angry with Pao? Could it be because she is a woman in a position of power or is it infinitely more complicated? It goes back to the sex discrimination lawsuit that Pao brought against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, Caufield and Byers in March. The
landmark trial that captivated Silicon Valley for a month
included details about all-male ski trips and Valentine’s gifts, and prompted former employees at Twitter and Facebook to file similar suits. In the process, Pao’s personal life, work habits, and emails were raked through the court. She was accused of being aggressive, timid, greedy, manipulative, and so on. You could say that the courtroom isn’t so different to the boardroom. Even though she lost – the jury sided with Kleiner Perkins’s case that Pao was “divisive and not a team player”
– the case shone a light on the lack of diversity in Silicon Valley.
Since the trial, Pao has become either the
reckless CEO intent on destroying the freedom of the internet, or the tech generation’s figurehead for speaking out against gender discrimination in the workplace, depending on who you talk to. “If I’ve helped level the playing field for women and minorities in venture capital, then the battle was worth it,” she told reporters outside the courtroom back in March. Her move to Reddit, at first glance, seemed incongruous. Maybe that was the point. After taking on Silicon Valley, where only 4% of senior investing partners at venture capital firms are women, could it be that Pao wanted to clean up what some regard as the biggest online mess of them all? Reddit, as well as being a breeding ground for memes and gifs, has a reputation, sometimes hard to square with site users used to its different face, for being
a toxic, misogynistic community. A Chinese-American feminist in charge? That’s really interesting.
It’s worth noting one complication: the employee fired by Reddit is a woman. But Pao was already in the limelight, and has a reputation for taking on sexual discrimination. In the six months since she has been in post, Pao has
removed negotiating – over cash salaries and equity – from Reddit’s recruitment process
because she felt men benefited more than women. “It’s an opportunity for me to try to put in things that I think are going to create this equal opportunity environment for everyone,” she said. She has banned “involuntary pornography” by ensuring people whose photos have been posted on Reddit without their consent can have them removed. And the company has introduced an anti-harassment policy: “We’re banning behaviour, not ideas.”
It’s not exactly shocking yet Pao is accused of waging a war on freedom. The response to introducing some
basic principles of respect and tolerance
to a site used by more than 150 million people every month has been tellingly disproportionate. In fact, the language of the petition to oust Pao says it all. “A vast majority of the Reddit community believes that Pao, ‘a manipulative individual who will sue her way to the top’, has overstepped the boundaries and fears that she will run Reddit into the ground.” Some might say the boundaries should have been overstepped long ago.
