You’d be hard-pressed to find a female boss in Silicon Valley who hasn’t faced some sort of harassment, but it’s difficult to imagine that anyone has gotten more hate than former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao. From racist “Chairman Pao” memes to hate mail and death threats, Pao has been on the receiving end of some of the worst the internet has to offer. Indeed, in her resignation note on the site, Pao wrote that some of what she’s seen on Reddit “made me doubt humanity,” and she urged users to “remember the human,” noting, “I have a family, and I have feelings.”



It’s clear, though, that what made Pao a target wasn’t solely her gender; She wasn’t just being attacked for being female, but for being a feminist. As Kaliya Young, founder of She’s Geeky, told the Guardian recently, “Ellen was at the center of a high-profile sexual discrimination suit versus a major VC firm and she was put in charge of the teenage boy section of the internet. What did you expect was going to happen? It was inevitable that they would turn on her.”

Reddit CEO Ellen Pao's exit has users asking: who was responsible? Read more

Pao took a hardline approach against sexism and online harassment during her tenure at Reddit. Under Pao’s leadership, the site introduced its first anti-harassment policy, banned revenge porn and removed five hateful subreddits, including r/fatpeoplehate and r/transfags.



Now, Pao is far from the first notable female CEO in Silicon Valley to deal with sexism. When Marissa Mayer announced her pregnancy the same day she was appointed CEO of Yahoo, she was both criticized for saying she would only take a few weeks leave and for believing she could run a Fortune 500 while parenting. (After she gave birth, she was taken to task for banning telecommuting while building herself an office nursery.) And at Mayer’s first annual shareholders’ meeting for Yahoo, one guy took the microphone to ask Mayer a question and said, “I’m a dirty old man, and you look attractive, Marissa.”



And Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg – who literally wrote the book on sexism in the workplace – kicked off her bestseller Lean In with an anecdote about a less explicit kind of sexsim: she was giving a presentation at a company when she asked where the women’s restroom was. A senior partner couldn’t give her the answer, because she was the only woman to have pitched the company in his time there.



Now, neither Sandberg nor Mayer were heading Reddit, a space so notorious for its noxious sexism and racism that the Southern Poverty Law Center called it the most hateful place on the internet. And both are white women, largely immune from the racist attacks that Pao endures.



'What did you expect?' Women in tech reflect on Ellen Pao's exit from Reddit Read more

But what’s also extremely relevant is that unlike Pao, their stance on feminism is a little bit more palatable. Mayer has distanced herself from the term, claiming that gender isn’t really an issue in tech. And while Sandberg is one of the most famous women fighting sexism, her push for equality is much more about working within the system then, well, suing it. While Sandberg is encouraging women to take a seat at the table, Pao is flipping the table over.



We need both styles of feminism – women taking a more cheerful, mainstream approach, and women taking names. But the less agreeable a woman’s activism, the more likely she is to get taken down for it.



As sociologist and former Reddit moderator Katherine Cross wrote at Feministing, “Outspoken women, especially non-white women like Pao, are instant targets if they publicly acknowledge the existence of prejudice, worse still if they purport to do something about it.”



There are lots of theories as to why Pao resigned/was pushed out - and harassment is just one piece of that puzzle. But if we want to create change in Silicon Valley, we need more women like Pao - leaders who are willing to put their asses, and jobs, on the line for equality.

