Ellen Pao

Ellen Kangru Pao (born 1970) is an American investor and activist who served as interim CEO for Reddit. Other positions she has held include investment partner at Kleiner Perkins, board director at Flipboard, and corporate attorney at Cravath, Swaine & Moore.
In 2015, unpopular decisions made during Pao's tenure at Reddit generated a wave of controversy that culminated in her stepping down. The backlash she received sparked debates both on the treatment of women in technology and the need for transparency in a company that relies on volunteers.
On June 2nd, 2020, she called out Reddit for "amplifying hate, racism, and violence" after Reddit released a response regarding the Black Lives Matter Movement.
== Exit from Reddit ==
On June 10, 2015, a post on Reddit, signed by Pao and two other executives, announced that five subreddits were being banned for fostering off-site harassment. One such community had over 150,000 subscribers. Multiple change.org petitions calling for Pao's resignation were created by displeased Reddit users and the most popular one reached 10,000 signatures in the days following the change. Some users began posting hateful comments and images about Pao on Reddit and other websites. Other complaints about the site focused on inadequate moderation tools and the fact that some posts critical of Ellen Pao's lawsuit had been deleted by moderators.
Opposition increased on July 2 when large sections of Reddit were set to private to protest the dismissal of Victoria Taylor, Reddit's director of talent, known for co-ordinating the Ask Me Anything interviews. Expressing frustration over the decline in communication from Reddit management, AMA moderators stated that they had only learned about the firing indirectly after it happened. Despite one post to the contrary, Taylor's dismissal was widely attributed to Pao, with some commentators suggesting that the move diminished her credibility as an advocate for female employees. She received increased harassment as a result and the petition for her removal surpassed 200,000 signatures.On July 3, Pao issued apologies through Reddit and Time magazine. However, the Reddit post was thought to have been deleted after it received enough downvotes to lose visibility. In a longer post on July 6, she apologized for poor communication between staff members and for not delivering on promises. Pao resigned on July 10 and was replaced by Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman.
On July 12, former CEO Yishan Wong who had previously defended the five bans on Quora began a series of posts which he referred to as "declassifying a lot of things". The first drew attention to the fact that Victoria Taylor was fired by Alexis Ohanian. When shown that the media was covering this post, Pao tweeted "thanks for not blaming me for it". In a later post, which recalled two instances of Pao arguing against purging hateful subreddits, Wong sharply criticized the movement against her and warned about stricter policies under the site's cofounders. Huffman followed this by enacting a policy to reduce the prominence of some xenophobic communities and ban some others. On July 13, Reddit's chief engineer Bethanye Blount left the company for unrelated reasons and opined that Pao did not receive enough support from the board. Specifically, she referenced the glass cliff phenomenon in which women are allegedly given disproportionately unstable leadership positions. On July 16, Ellen Pao wrote about the difficulty of combating harassment while preserving "edgy content". The editorial described what she called "one of the largest trolling attacks in history" and the subsequent outpouring of support.
Category:Reddit admins