The Times Comes to the Defense of Ellen Pao
Posted on July 12th, 2015 in Uncategorized | 11 Comments »
Given my interest in Buddy Fletcher, I can’t help but be fascinated by the ongoing saga of his wife, Ellen Pao, who, after losing her sex discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins, has now resigned under pressure from her position as interim CEO of Reddit.
I’m not a Reddit user, and so I’m reluctant to propose conclusions about what really happened to Pao there; given the levels of intrigue about the ins and outs of the site, this feels like a story that’s very hard for the mainstream media to understand.
(I felt the same way about the Grateful Dead shows in Chicago a couple weeks ago, as when various non-Deadhead music writers criticized the band for playing the beautiful and powerful song “Days Between” as slowing down the band’s finals show, without realizing what resonance it has for Deadheads who remember the wistful beauty with which Jerry Garcia sang it. But I digress.)
But you don’t have to be a Reddit expert to know bad media coverage, and the Times provides a perfect example of it with its story on Pao, aggressively titled “It’s Silicon Valey 2, Ellen Pao 0: Fighter of Sexism is Out at Reddit.”
Let’s start with the headline and then say a few words about the actual content of the article.
To label Pao a “fighter of sexism” is to accept her proposition that fighting sexism was the raison d’être of her lawsuit, rather than the $16 million she hoped to get paid—money that she and her husband desperately need given his enormous financial debts. (He’s something like $150 million in debt.) Is it fair to describe Pao as a fighter of sexism when a jury of six men and six women found that she was not a victim of sexism?
“Fighter of sexism” is obviously a loaded term, and it aligns the Times squarely behind Pao, as does the rest of the headline: “Silicon Valley 2, Ellen Pao 0″, making it sound as if big bad Silicon Valley is picking on poor put-upon Pao. According to the Times, there are only two sides here: Silicon Valley and the fighter against sexism. This is how history is written, so…it matters.
Here’s how the Times frames the story:
Ms. Pao’s abrupt downfall in the face of a torrent of sexist and racist comments, many of them on Reddit itself, is quite likely to renew charges that bullying, harassment and cruel behavior are out of control on the web — and that Silicon Valley’s well-publicized problem with gender and ethnic diversity in its work force persists.
I get that there was bigotry and sexism in many of the comments Reddit users wrote about Pao. Part of me deplores them; part of me thinks, “Welcome to the Internet.”
What’s unclear to me is how much substance there was in the allegations that Pao was a bad CEO; after all, over 200, 000 Reddit users signed a petition calling on her to step down. Is that because she is a woman and Asian? Or is it because she just wasn’t very good at her job—which is exactly what Kleiner Perkins said of Pao.
Amidst the swirl of bias allegations, we now have two highly competitive institutions—Kleiner Perkins and Reddit—suggesting that, in fact, Ellen Pao is, at the very least, a difficult personality. This is the kind of thing that makes these sexism allegations hard to dismiss; some men are difficult personalities—Steve Jobs was a difficult personality—but their fans don’t seem to care. Yet when a woman is a difficult personality….
But perhaps difficulty is tolerated not because of gender, but because of talent. Jobs got away with being difficult—well, except when he was fired from Apple for it—because he was a genius. Maybe Ellen Pao is difficult and just, you know, a pretty smart person. That was the impression I got watching this interview with Katie Couric, where, every time Pao was asked about the lawsuit, she repeats the mantra, “We’re not talking about it.” After about the fifth time she says that, Couric has to help her out and say, “And you’re not talking about it because you’re thinking of appealing the verdict?”
Pap also refuses to answer a question about her husband in a sort of odd, off-putting way.
And I suppose that this is crucial to some of my own skepticism about Pao. First, there are times, like in the interview above, where she comes across as robotic and weird. (And yes, I know that “robotic” is a loaded term to apply to an Asian person, but…watch the interview.)
Second, she married a man who is bizarrely litigious—even though a judge ruled that Fletcher must pay investors in his hedge fund $140 million, and Fletcher is being sued by various law firms for non-payment of millions of dollars in legal fees, Fletcher is still pursuing his racial discrimination lawsuit against the Dakota, which wouldn’t sell him an apartment on the grounds that his finances were shaky—and, in my opinion, of questionable character. (There’s evidence to suggest that Fletcher drained his funds dry, including pension monies for Louisiana firefighters, to support a lavish lifestyle.)
Is it sexist to suggest that Pao’s relationship with Fletcher is part of what one should consider when considering her? Many in the mainstream media seem to think so, because the issue is largely avoided there. And maybe in a courtroom, her marriage isn’t relevant. But when considering the entirety of a person—her character, her motivations—I don’t see how you can ignore it.
11 Responses
7/12/2023 10:34 am
It’s unclear here if you are aware of the massive stealth edits that NYT made to their original article. It’s at newsdiffs.org. Comparing: It’s Silicon Valley 2, Ellen Pao 0: Fighter of Sexism Is Out at Reddit Stunningly, they replaced news reporting with narrative and spin, rather than the other way around.
7/12/2023 12:21 pm
Wow. Just went through those edits on newsdiffs… Amazing. I wonder if they monitor the click-throughs and adjust the article to the taste of the readers, or if they try to influence the readers with the changes. Probably a little of both.
But it is amazing watching the process of news turned into advocacy in almost real time. And hilarious: Sexist to Male-dominated to Sexist to Male-dominated to…
7/12/2023 4:12 pm
Steve Jobs was a very difficult person, but he also earned a huge amount of money for his shareholders. Ellen Pao may be somewhat less difficult than he was, but her (in)ability to generate any sort of acceptable return for her bosses seems off-limits as a subject for media outlets like the Times to explore. An honest discussion of the subject would include that.
It’s been noted that women often accept riskier CEO challenges than do men for a variety of reasons; sadly one of the possibilities that doesn’t seem to have been explored is to what degree women accept those positions out of a fear that it may be their only shot at being a CEO and thus worth taking despite the long odds. Given that being CEO of Reddit may have been a high-risk proposition, Pao’s personality and other shortcomings may have made her a particularly bad fit.
7/12/2023 6:25 pm
You get the feeling that six or seven years from now some votary of Frederick Lewis Allen will publish a memoir of this time we live in. It’s getting a ‘crazy years’ feel I haven’t had since about 1980.
7/12/2023 7:28 pm
Wow…that editing really is fascinating. And not in a good way for the NYT.
7/13/2015 10:45 am
Thank you for this. I found the NYT headline and article offensive. I have been following the strange Fletcher - Pao saga for some time (He, a scam artist/thief; She: a shakedown artist).
7/13/2015 1:27 pm
For me the rub with Ellen Pao comes at the 27:12 mark, when in the course of a discussion about mentors vs. sponsors (mentors “are willing to offer advice” and sponsors “are willing to help you get there, are really invested in making you successful,”) she claims “I believe most men have sponsors who get them where they want to go.”
That says it all for me. I’m not sure what planet she’s living on, but speaking for myself as well as almost all of the men I’ve worked with over a 20-year career, I can say that statement is pure bullshit. The only people besides myself who were really invested in making me successful were my parents, and they offered a willing ear, encouraging words and a warm meal when I needed one, but precious little beyond that. I certainly know a few men, and as many women, who have been lucky enough to find career sherpas, either through luck, family connections, or drive, but to claim this is true for “most men” is utter nonsense and demonstrates how clueless Pao (the daughter of a professor of math at NYU) is.
7/13/2015 2:34 pm
It is very interesting to see how institutions, and the people who head those institutions, react to
donor money.
Some take money from just about anyone, without checking the source.
Some have taken money from people who turn out to be felons. This doesn’t seem to bother some institutions, which keep the donor’s name on the building. Of course
some institutions seek to remove the name when problems crop up with the donor (which seems to be happening with a famous celebrity), but others do not.
Some universities take money from people… people which the institutions have been warned against (e.g. problems with how the money has been made) and even accept gifts of an asset where there is a major problem with the valuation of the asset. Some universities
take money from people to fund professorships, but make special exemptions (for various reasons) for
some people in that they don’t require those people to fully fund these professorships as they would require others to do.
Thoughts of discrimination dance in the heads of the heads of the universities, but nary a thought
of greed.
7/13/2015 9:53 pm
Reddit, of course, is for people who want “4chan lite.” The use case for either seems to me to be “classified noise” only marginally worse than the Twit-verse. One tends to forget that Reddit was co-founded by Aaron Swartz, who wants us all to be sorry for his inability to understand that “civil disobedience” tends to make those disobeying spend time in a locked room under the control of jailers.
In an ideal world, Ellen Pao and Reddit would both suffer. Indeed, that may turn out to be the case.
My “issue” with Reddit (since I don’t have time for the noise) was their abuse of the term “interim CEO.” As used elsewhere in the universe, an interim CEO is a company insider (or recent retiree) put back into service due to the inability of the CEO to serve. Ellen Pao, as best I can tell, was Reddit’s second CEO. Now, they have a third one, but at least he’s another of the “co-founders” of Reddit.
Interim reads like “tryout” to me, and a tryout CEO is something that should never be attempted in anything higher level than a schoolyard sand box. CEOs need to execute, not “show us if and how you will execute while we figure out the reason our company exists.”
More distressing, I would have thought for Ellen Pao’s “defenders” (enablers, mostly) is that Ellen Pao (and her immediate predecessor) took the position of “interim CEO.”
Externally, she looks like a shoo-in for a middle management position in any fortune 500 company: undergraduate electrical engineering degree from Princeton, Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
But, apparently, while not learning how to start or run a new business while at school, she figured out that a few stints with failing startups made her a shoo-in for Venture Capital. John Doerr, after working with her for a while, thought she behaved entitled and figured out that maybe she should run a company. That was just kicking the can down the road: whatever Ellen Pao learned of business, it didn’t include “working well with others.”
I wish her well, but don’t plan on ever interviewing her. I hope she figures out what the “interim” cost her: because it signals that she either doesn’t know how to negotiate, or considers herself unqualified to be a CEO.
Here’s a thought: Ellen Pao should come up with a new business idea. Seek funding for it. Put together a team. Seek a place in the market. That’s the only real way for her at this point to be a CEO.
As for her saying on departure that there was a difference in opinion between the board (her bosses) and herself on the company’s growth figures. That is either highly misleading (having the moderators cut traffic certainly was a drag on user involvement and growth, and she caused the underlying problems) or simply a lie: as an “interim CEO” she concluded the best she could get was to serve at the whim of the board.
Here’s a hint for Ms. Pao. When there is a problem at a company the ceo (not you) identifies the problem and then fixes the problem. The best you could do was to conclusorily state that Reddit “had to get better.” They did: they got rid of you.
Ellen Pao seems to be extremely controlled in business interactions, saving up resentments for years. In her personal choices and life, she appears to be wild and uncontrolled. She can, or course, clearly claim to have turned an openly gay man into a breeder. Maybe there is hope for Barry Manilow’s female fans.
7/14/2015 9:41 am
I believe the user revolt and petition happened after a woman that worked for Reddit, who was universally liked by the user base, was abruptly fired. That doesn’t really fit into the media narrative though does it?
7/14/2015 12:38 pm
Donk;
I’m picking at nits, but there was “no user revolt.” There was a “moderator” revolt, and they are unpaid but (bad business model alert) are important to the operation of Reddit. I don’t know what “media narrative” you are familiar with that doesn’t touch these points; all I have read have mentioned everything I write here aside from my first sentence.