The Education of Ellen Pao

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/books/review/ellen-pao-reset-silicon-valley-memoir.html

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RESET My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change By Ellen K. Pao 274 pp. Spiegel & Grau. $28

There’s a particular kind of resentment that can fester when a self-described rule follower feels she did everything right only to be thwarted by unwritten rules that feel arbitrary and wrong. In “Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change,” Ellen K. Pao traces a journey of disillusionment that culminated in the lawsuit she brought against her employer, the white-shoe venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, for gender discrimination. Pao lost her case in 2015, after a grueling cross-examination by the other side’s attorney, who presented into evidence a “resentment” chart Pao kept of her colleagues and accused Pao of “never” having “done anything for women.” “I’d been instructed by my lawyers not to respond to comments like that, because it might open me up to more criticism — jurors could find me difficult or aggressive,” Pao writes. “I ended up coming across as distant, even a bit robotic, as I bit my tongue to keep my answers short and noncombative.”

This pressing need to avoid seeming “difficult or aggressive” wasn’t entirely unfamiliar to her. Pao is an accomplished woman, after all — a triple threat with degrees in engineering (Princeton), law (Harvard) and business (Harvard, again) — and “Reset” includes a number of passages delineating the very fine line that a professional woman in a male-dominated field will, at some point, most likely find herself treading: “Is it possible that I am really too ambitious while being too quiet while being too aggressive while being unlikable? Are my elbows too sharp?” Or again, about 20 pages later: “If you talk, you talk too much. If you don’t talk, you’re too quiet. You don’t own the room. If you want to protect your work, you’re not a team player. Your elbows are too sharp.”

“Reset” contains a fair amount of repetition like this — which doesn’t make it a bad book, though it can sometimes come across as disjointed. It is a tricky thing to write a memoir that’s also supposed to function as self-help and tell-all and activist’s manifesto, as well as indictment. Hammer your points too hard, and you don’t reveal enough of yourself as an ambivalent, fallible human being; reveal too much of yourself as an ambivalent, fallible human being, and you risk opening seams in the armor of your case.

Pao starts with her guard up, painting a largely idyllic portrait of her childhood in Maplewood, N.J., as the middle daughter of high-achieving Chinese immigrants, who inculcated their children with a tenacious work ethic and a fervent belief in the American dream. To her parents, Pao writes, “America was a land of boundless potential; any experience of exclusion could be solved like an engineering problem.” She concedes that as the only Asian children in the community, the Pao girls were subject to awful jokes and the occasional epithet, but “most of the time there was harmony in Maplewood, and my sisters and I flourished there together.” The sections on her childhood are filled with bland sentiments like this. Her parents had “kept their heads down and worked hard,” and they told their daughters to do the same.

The chapters on the early years of her career trace auspicious beginnings at Princeton, and then at Harvard Law School and a job at a white-shoe law firm. Sure, there was the creep who would peer down women’s blouses, and the one who would brush up against women in the halls — not to mention the senior partner who would stand outside the doorway of a colleague’s office, “licking an ice cream cone while staring at her.” But Pao didn’t think much about those incidents at the time and held fast to the doctrine in which she was raised: “I had faith in the system, because it seemed to work.”

At least it seemed to work for her — she who was accomplishing so much, climbing the ranks, eventually leaving a lucrative career in law in order to get an M.B.A. and pursue a lucrative career in Silicon Valley. A first marriage to an investment banker comes and goes with barely a ripple. It’s only when the memoir arrives at her tenure as a chief of staff at Kleiner Perkins that she fully sheds the voice of the innocent babe in the woods and allows some welcome cynicism and anger to come through. Her sentences get sharper; her jokes more cutting. She is scornful and funny on the managing partners’ deathly fear of flying commercial and their rich-people preparations for the apocalypse, much of which entails escaping to New Zealand. (“Maybe it’s the operational manager in me, but all I can think about are apocalypse logistics: What zombie pilot is going to fly all those planes, and which zombie air-traffic controller is going to help land them?”) Lonely, and at an age when she thought she would have started a family, she has a few sexual encounters with a colleague, whom she describes as charmless but persistent. She ends things when she discovers he’s not in fact getting divorced from his wife, and eventually, she says, the retaliation starts, when he gets promoted and begins wielding power over her, freezing her out of opportunities and giving her negative performance reviews.

The other men, she says, retreated to their boys’ club. “I heard often that women were just not funny or that we weren’t able to take a joke or didn’t smile enough,” she writes, recalling that her boss suggested she take a course in stand-up comedy in order “to get airtime.” Of course, as Pao acidly notes, “I didn’t find the men particularly hilarious.” They went on all-male retreats and arranged all-male dinners, insisting women would “kill the buzz.” When Kleiner hired an investigator and Pao tried to report an extended conversation between some of the men about porn stars, the investigator kept asking her about a porn star they hadn’t talked about, “saying that Sasha Grey was crossing over into legitimate acting. … He seemed to really want to talk about Sasha Grey and her career.”

Readers looking for other kinds of workplace gossip will find a smattering here: a venture capital scion who “never seemed to work particularly hard”; a self-proclaimed vegetarian who would load up his plate with steak at the office lunch buffet; the managing partners’ bizarre fixation on hiring 26-year-olds. Pao describes a whirlwind courtship with her current husband, the black hedge fund manager Alphonse Fletcher Jr., known as Buddy, who helped her become more attuned to issues of race and intersectionality. They had a daughter in 2008, and in 2012, pregnant again, Pao filed her lawsuit and had a miscarriage a month later. She felt “Kleiner had taken everything from me,” and she “began to speak up in the office,” having nothing left to lose.

But of course there was still plenty to lose, and she describes the feeling of sitting in court, “listening to Kleiner partners trash me from the stand,” saying Pao was “not the warmest person,” “a bit too opinionated” — or, as one partner cruelly put it, a “cancer.” In a bitterly ironic turn, Pao was forced to resign from her position as interim chief executive at Reddit less than four months after she lost her lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins, having already drawn the ire of Reddit users outraged by her decision to rid the site of revenge porn and other offensive content. They bombarded her with everything from penis imagery to threats of rape and murder.

Pao doesn’t have too much to say about her experience with the online hordes other than to state that she was obviously terrified. After all, what is there to parse? The foul misogynists on Reddit never pretended to be anything other than foul misogynists; it was the genteel chauvinism of the enlightened elites at Kleiner Perkins that carried with it the sting of betrayal. They promised her a meritocracy and gave her a glass ceiling instead: “It just wasn’t fair.”

She’s right. But then there’s plenty of unfairness to go around. Even as a stymied member of the professional-managerial class, she’s close enough to the top that stuff rolls downhill — to the receptionist who ends up fetching the cookies for a meeting when Pao (understandably) doesn’t want to, or the nanny whose daily shift begins at 5:30 a.m. so that Pao can make it to 6:30 a.m. meetings (which were set up by Kleiner Perkins after her maternity leave, as if “to haze me”). Pao, like Sheryl Sandberg, implies that having more women in positions of power will eventually benefit all women, and “Reset” ends with her having found sisterhood and solidarity in the tech world, helping found Project Include to fix a system that has “exclusion built into its design.”

This sounds like a promising development for Silicon Valley. For her book, though, it puts Pao back in safety mode, as she abandons the scabrous energy of her middle chapters and reverts to the kind of upbeat language she used when describing her childhood. The same goes for the metaphor she chose for her title. “Reset” sounds so careful and inoffensive and technocratic; after seeing a glimpse of the franker, free-wheeling Ellen Pao, one can’t help hoping for something more.