Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change By: Ellen Pao Post 2

In the first part of her autobiography, Ellen Pao recounts her first encounters with discrimination. She starts by saying that besides a few isolated events her childhood was generally free from any negative experiences and her time at Princeton mirrored this. However, when she enrolls at Harvard Law,  things begin to change. She is finally made aware of the discriminatory opinions that still inhabit Harvard students and professors alike. White male professors would share their beliefs that none of the women or Black professors were qualified enough to teach at Harvard Law. As she graduated and moved on to a top law firm things got more slightly more obvious. She says she saw little things that didn’t seem to mean a whole lot. Events like senior partners taking twelve of Pao’s male peers to a four-hour steak dinner one of Pao’s friends, one of the few Black female lawyers and a graduate of Harvard Law, being mistaken for an assistant. No one interaction was the end of the world,” but they didn’t necessarily heal or go away on their own.” She says that eventually, she realized that each isolated occurrence was almost never overtly discriminatory but paired together created a hostile work environment.

Pao decided that it was time to move from law because of its repetitiveness rather than any of the “slight” discrimination she had witnessed. She decided to go West to California for Silicon Valley but first, she would attend Harvard Business School to catch up on what she would need to know. After finishing HBS she worked at various startups with a short stint in management consulting, when one day she received specs from a friend for a chief-of-staff position at Venture Capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The incredibly long list of necessary experience perfectly matched her resume and despite some doubts, she decided to take the job.

During her time at Kleiner, she was learning so much said she felt as if she was in grad school again, however, this did not last long. At first, she didn’t realize what she experiencing was actually discrimination. Pao says of her time there that men were often rewarded for their ambition but for women you would be known as having “sharp elbows”, bad at working in a team and overall just being too aggressive. Another example was when Pao had brought in CEOs she had known from previous investments and one of the CEOs forwarded her an email from a senior partner at her firm trying to go around her to set up a meeting after she had introduced the CEO to the firm. Two of the senior partners had previously disregarded her advice and now they had gone behind her back to do what she had suggested in the first place. The discrimination and backstabbing didn’t stop only at Pao other women felt the effects too, her boss had hired an intern handpicked from the president Stanford, half the job end up including babysitting his kids. Occurrences such as those continued to happen, increasing in their blatantness until Pao could no longer stand working there anymore. She decided this when the partner who had hit on her when she was hit by a cab and who she had briefly seen began to make the problems impossible to avoid. He would cut her out of meetings, mess up her work and when her male counterpart was consistently began given more opportunities she knew it was time to go, but her boss insisted she stay promising that things would change. She tried to stay but eventually, it really became too much. Her concerns and complaints were ignored for too long and she decided to take action, she would bring a lawsuit against Kleiner.

When she finally got to court, Kleiner discredited her in every way possible. They made her look like she bad at her job. While she followed the rules, Kleiner spoke with the press and hired crisis-management firms. Pao says like she felt like she had a responsibility to do this. She says many women face discrimination at their jobs all the time but she was in a unique position to be able to afford the lawyer fees and deal with everything that came with it. In the end, Pao lost. She says it was due to not being able to compete with the best lawyers who charge hundreds of thousands of dollars and that “people were not ready” to believe her over a huge firm, like Kleiner which had millions of dollars to unload on the suit.

Overall, I found this book was very enlightening to the persistent discrimination in Silicon Valley and other male-dominated fields. Many people assume that gender discrimination doesn’t occur in the workplace but the common theme occurs women are scared to talk about it because of the backlash they will face and as a result, it seems as if the problem has gone away. Ellen Pao deciding to go through with the lawsuit instead of taking the settlement has allowed many people to understand what is truly going on. Even during the lawsuit, many women reached out to Pao to share their experiences with discrimination that they had been too afraid or ashamed of sharing before. This book and her lawsuit have brought to light the real issues that still occur in business and many other fields. This book is a step in the right direction and has served many women by empowering them to share their stories.