Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change - Hardcover

Pao, Ellen

 
9780399591013: Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 039959101X ISBN 13: 9780399591013
Verlag: Random House, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

The “necessary and incisive” (Roxane Gay) account of the discrimination case that “has blown open a conversation about the status of women” in the workplace (The New York Times)

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 FINANCIAL TIMES AND MCKINSEY BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR | NAMED A BEST FALL BOOK BY ELLE AND BUSTLE

In 2015, Ellen K. Pao sued a powerhouse Silicon Valley venture capital firm, calling out workplace discrimination and retaliation against women and other underrepresented groups. Her suit rocked the tech world—and exposed its toxic culture and its homogeneity. Her message overcame negative PR attacks that took aim at her professional conduct and her personal life, and she won widespread public support—Time hailed her as “the face of change.” Though Pao lost her suit, she revolutionized the conversation at tech offices, in the media, and around the world. In Reset, she tells her full story for the first time.

The daughter of immigrants, Pao was taught that through hard work she could achieve her dreams. She earned multiple Ivy League degrees, worked at top startups, and in 2005 was recruited by Kleiner Perkins, arguably the world’s leading venture capital firm at the time. In many ways, she did everything right, and yet she and other women and people of color were excluded from success—cut out of decisive meetings and email discussions, uninvited to CEO dinners and lavish networking trips, and had their work undercut or appropriated by male executives. It was time for a system reset.

After Kleiner, Pao became CEO of reddit, where she took forceful action to change the status quo for the company and its product. She banned revenge porn and unauthorized nude photos—an action other large media sites later followed—and shut down parts of reddit over online harassment. She and seven other women tech leaders formed Project Include, an award-winning nonprofit for accelerating diversity and inclusion in tech. In her book, Pao shines a light on troubling issues that plague today’s workplace and lays out practical, inspiring, and achievable goals for a better future.

Ellen K. Pao’s Reset is a rallying cry—the story of a whistleblower who aims to empower everyone struggling to be heard, in Silicon Valley and beyond.

Praise for Reset

“Necessary and incisive . . . As Ellen Pao detailed her experiences, while also communicating her passion for the work men often impeded her from doing, I was nothing short of infuriated. It was great to see a highly accomplished woman of color speaking out like this, and hopefully this book will encourage more women to come forward, give voice to their experiences in the workplace, and contribute to meaningful change.”—Roxane Gay

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ellen K. Pao is a tech investor, a diversity and inclusion activist at the Kapor Center for Social Impact, the former CEO of reddit, and a cofounder of the award-winning diversity and inclusion nonprofit Project Include. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Time, Lenny, and Recode. She has earned an electrical engineering degree from Princeton and law and business degrees from Harvard.

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Chapter 1

From China to Maplewood

I grew up firmly believing the world was a meritocracy. That’s how I was raised, and it carried me a long way. My parents grew up in China. They studied hard to get scholarships to graduate schools in the United States, where they found solid, stable jobs, worked with smart people, and raised their three children to continue the cycle of achievement. By the time I left home to take on the world, I was confident that my strong values and work ethic could help me overcome any challenges. For a long time they did.

My parents modeled ambition and resilience for us, having fled China for Taiwan in the 1940s during the Chinese Civil War. Both their families lost a great deal, having been much wealthier in peacetime China than in postwar Taiwan, and my parents had to work hard for everything they got. They studied engineering and looked for the best opportunities. When President John F. Kennedy opened up immigration to scientists who could help launch U.S. rockets to the moon, my parents seized the chance and came over as part of the Kennedy space program.

My father went to Princeton for his PhD in mechanical and aeronautical engineering. He was a nerd who loved Star Wars. He was a nonconformist, constantly reading, debating, and evolving. When he was studying to get into college, he was so focused that he forgot to eat and was hospitalized for exhaustion. I have some of that same intensity.

My mother was one of the first women to earn a PhD in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania. With her, what you see is what you get. She doesn’t have a hidden agenda, she doesn’t brag or exaggerate, and she doesn’t know how to pretend, so she’s genuine and straightforward almost to a fault. (I think I get that from her, too, for better and for worse.) My mom is so curious that she’s never bored. She can have and enjoy a conversation with anyone in the world. When I learned recently that she’d been her high school class president back in Taiwan, I wasn’t surprised.

My parents first met on a blind date set up by mutual friends. They were in grad school at the time, and my dad drove his red Corvair down from Princeton to Philadelphia to meet my mom. They quickly fell in love and were married within six months. Over the next five years, they had three children. When my father started teaching math at NYU, we settled in Maplewood, New Jersey, for the good schools, the space, and the privacy.

To my parents, America was a land of boundless potential; any experience of exclusion could be solved like an engineering problem. When they had first arrived in the United States, they didn’t feel all that welcomed by the main group of grad students, so they ended up bonding with other Chinese students and Jewish students. None of them had much money—­they often cooked together and shared dinner. They also shared a belief that a great education would help them succeed. Even if my parents felt like outsiders, they believed that if they kept their heads down and worked hard, they could achieve their goals here in the United States—­and indeed they both forged excellent careers.

My mother worked most of her career at Bell Labs, where she became a star, joining one of the most hardcore, respected research teams there. Bell Labs was the research arm of the corporate giant AT&T. It was also close to our house, and the job allowed her to control her hours and keep our family her top priority. She came home every day at 5:30 p.m. to make us dinner. She took care of the household, for a while even sewing our clothes. She focused on the important stuff: She didn’t over-­parent the three of us but would talk to us about values on the car ride to school. If we had a birthday, she would spend her time making our favorite dinner rather than baking cupcakes for our class; she was the mom who would send us into school with a giant bag of candy bars instead. Other mothers may have scoffed, but their kids loved it.

My mother’s devotion to our family meant she only took on local projects with predictable hours, which I’m sure must have impacted her career trajectory, but I never heard her complain. Instead, she pushed herself harder. And she would travel when it was essential to a project. During those trips, she would lecture us by phone and my dad would take care of us. He knew how to prepare three foods—­scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, and delivery pizza—­so for a week or two at a time that was our diet.

My dad was a born professor. He loved to teach, to do research, to be a part of intellectual discussions. After Princeton, he spent most of his career at NYU’s Courant Institute, with stints at Brown, MIT, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Usually he was close by, and when he taught at MIT for a semester, we visited him often.

Together, my parents encouraged our interest in math and science from a very early age. I can recall the exact moment I fell in love with learning how things work: at age four, after playing with a toy electric train with dying batteries. Seeing and understanding how something could go from working to not working and back again seemed to me like magic. I took apart toys and puzzles and put them back together for the rest of my childhood. Whenever they saw me tinkering, my parents would boast that I was going to be an engineer.

My love for engineering grew after our family got our first home computer in the early 1980s—­a Sinclair ZX mail-­order kit that you put together yourself. My dad followed the tech world closely, and both my parents pushed us all to learn how to code at age twelve. I loved figuring out how to write a short program that could flash my name—­“ELLEN!”—­on the screen in colors of my own choosing. As I became more proficient, my mom brought home a battered copy of The C Programming Language book, the now-­iconic coding bible written by her coworkers, and gave me access to the servers at her office. At age thirteen, I was taking the train into the city to take computer classes at NYU. It was thrilling and inspiring and sparked a love for technology that still drives me today.

My parents were firm believers in the power of education to help us get ahead. Growing up, we never had a lot of extra money, because my parents were always saving for college. My mother taught us that hard work in school would result in rewards for the rest of our lives. That had been the way her life went: She’d won a merit scholarship to a private boarding school in Taipei. That led to a top college in Taiwan and then graduate school in the United States. My father also studied intensely for the college entrance exams in Taipei. What college you went to and what major you studied were solely determined by those test scores. He aced the test and went to the most prestigious college in Taiwan. For my parents, life was simple: If you studied and worked hard and did your best, you got ahead—­end of story. Discrimination and exclusion were a reality, but for them such obstacles could be overcome by working twice as hard, learning twice as much, and being twice as persistent.

When we first moved to Maplewood, it wasn’t a very diverse community. It was a mostly white, mostly middle-­class, safe small town where you said hi to everyone you saw on the street. My sisters and I were the only Asian kids in the suburb. At their first parent-­teacher conference, my parents were told by a kindergarten teacher to stop speaking Chinese at home if they wanted their daughters to do well in school. My parents took that advice to heart, raising us girls to be American-­sounding and -­acting as much as possible.

In spite of how much we...

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Verlag
Random House
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
039959101X
ISBN 13 
9780399591013
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
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