This week on All Ears, Abby is joined by Ellen Pao. Pao made headlines in 2012 when she sued venture capital firm Kleiner-Perkins for gender discrimination. In 2015 she lost the lawsuit, but it sent shockwaves throughout Silicon Valley and got people talking about the rampant bro-culture, sexism and bad behaviors that had gone unchallenged there for so long. She went on to become the interim CEO of Reddit, where she banned revenge porn and shut down some of the worst subreddits. Now she runs Project Include, a non-profit that is focused on increasing diversity and inclusion in the tech industry. In this week’s conversation with Abby, she talks about the impact of her lawsuit, her brief but influential time at Reddit, Silicon Valley’s obsession with 26 year-old white, cis men in hoodies, and her hope for the future of the tech industry. Tune in for a thoughtful discussion on what can go right and what does go wrong in Silicon Valley.
EPISODE LINKS
Ellen Pao's Website
Project Include Website
Reset: My Fight For Inclusion and Lasting Change by Ellen Pao
The Pao v. Kleiner Perkins Gender Discrimination Lawsuit
The Guardian, 'They don't think it's important': Ellen Pao on why Facebook can't beat hate, 2020
New York Times, Ellen Pao Disrupts How Silicon Valley Does Business, 2015
New York Times, Ellen Pao Loses Silicon Valley Bias Case Against Kleiner Perkins, 2015
New York Times, Lawsuit Shakes Foundation of a Man’s World of Tech, 2012
VOX, A Who’s-Who of the Kleiner Perkins-Ellen Pao Trial, 2015
The Verge, Ellen Pao shifted hiring practices at Reddit to improve diversity, 2015
The Guardian, Reddit chief Ellen Pao resigns after receiving ‘sickening’ abuse from users, 2015
The Verge, Timnit Gebru was fired from Google–then the harassers arrived, 2021
This week on All Ears, Abby is joined by Ellen Pao. Pao made headlines in 2012 when she sued venture capital firm Kleiner-Perkins for gender discrimination. In 2015 she lost the lawsuit, but it sent shockwaves throughout Silicon Valley and got people talking about the rampant bro-culture, sexism and bad behaviors that had gone unchallenged there for so long. She went on to become the interim CEO of Reddit, where she banned revenge porn and shut down some of the worst subreddits. Now she runs Project Include, a non-profit that is focused on increasing diversity and inclusion in the tech industry. In this week’s conversation with Abby, she talks about the impact of her lawsuit, her brief but influential time at Reddit, Silicon Valley’s obsession with 26 year-old white, cis men in hoodies, and her hope for the future of the tech industry. Tune in for a thoughtful discussion on what can go right and what does go wrong in Silicon Valley.
EPISODE LINKS
Ellen Pao's Website
Project Include Website
Reset: My Fight For Inclusion and Lasting Change by Ellen Pao
The Pao v. Kleiner Perkins Gender Discrimination Lawsuit
The Guardian, 'They don't think it's important': Ellen Pao on why Facebook can't beat hate, 2020
New York Times, Ellen Pao Disrupts How Silicon Valley Does Business, 2015
New York Times, Ellen Pao Loses Silicon Valley Bias Case Against Kleiner Perkins, 2015
New York Times, Lawsuit Shakes Foundation of a Man’s World of Tech, 2012
VOX, A Who’s-Who of the Kleiner Perkins-Ellen Pao Trial, 2015
The Verge, Ellen Pao shifted hiring practices at Reddit to improve diversity, 2015
The Guardian, Reddit chief Ellen Pao resigns after receiving ‘sickening’ abuse from users, 2015
The Verge, Timnit Gebru was fired from Google–then the harassers arrived, 2021
All Ears with Abigail Disney
Season 3 Episode 5: Ellen Pao
If I Had a Hundred Billion Dollars, I Could Send Anybody into Space
Air Date: October 14, 2021
ABIGAIL DISNEY: How thick is your skin, I mean, you took a beating.
ELLEN PAO: Yeah, and I think everybody who speaks up on these issues takes a beating. What drives me and I think what drives a lot of the other mostly women who have spoken up is just this idea of right and wrong. And what is happening is so wrong, and people need to hear about what it looks like in order to understand how wrong it is.
[MUSIC]
ABIGAIL DISNEY: That was my guest Ellen Pao. In the past few years, she’s spent her days ringing the alarm bells about bro culture in Silicon valley. And she's become very vocal in her criticisms of the giants of social media and their reluctance to curb abuse and misinformation on their platforms. She knows from experience, actually, that it's possible to act. When she was interim CEO of Reddit she banned revenge porn and took down some of the most despicable subreddits. But all of that came after she made a choice in 2012, which pushed her into the national spotlight for the first time. It was a decision that would change the course of her life and have ripple effects across Silicon Valley. Back then she was working in venture capital at the firm Kleiner Perkins, one of the biggest, and frankly, most notorious in the valley. It was a big time, lucrative job in a competitive field. Sounds like a good gig, right? But after working there for seven years, she did something unexpected, something she knew would have big professional consequences. She sued the firm for gender discrimination. And not only that, she took them to a very public trial. For 24 days in 2015 her case was the talk of the town.
Gerri Willis on Fox News: We begin tonight with the Ellen Pao sex discrimination suit against Kleiner Perkins.
Fox News Anchors: -You're talking about an all male culture, an all male outing.
-Well let's talk about gender for just a second.
Gerri Willis on Fox News: This is a big, big case with implications for workplaces all over the country.
NBC News Anchor: Everyone in Silicon Valley, paying very special attention to this lawsuit.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: In the end, Ellen lost the case, but regardless of the outcome, her lawsuit blew the lid off sexism in the tech industry and helped pave the way for the me too movement. In 2017, she released a memoir: Reset: My Fight For Inclusion and Lasting Change. In our conversation, we talk about how sexism is pretty much hardwired into the foundations of the tech world and how hard it is to change, but also how she came to speak out despite being, by her own admission, an unlikely crusader.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: Was it hard for you? Were you worried about the decision to start speaking up?
ELLEN PAO: Yeah, it's not my nature. I'm an introvert. I'm a follower. I respect authority. I grew up in an Asian household where there's a lot of respect for hierarchy, so it was not natural to me. And it's still not natural to me. Like I have to force myself to speak up. I'm not a person who wants to have attention. So it's a very, you know, it was something that I felt was out of necessity. What I think is really interesting is now like, through my speaking up and through so many other people speaking up, there's a generation of people for whom they're not conditioned, where they are educated at a very early age about the unfairness and the lack of meritocracy and the structural problems early on. And I'm so curious to see if they're able to change things faster and to have a much better experience than we have had.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: Yeah.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: The experiences that could have been better weren't just at Kleiner Perkins. By the time she got to the firm, Ellen had already seen sexism at other jobs, including startups and a brief couple of years working in corporate law. But she had always believed that a work ethic, doggedness, smarts, those would be enough to help her succeed.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: You describe really well the grind of the kind of sexist work environment where the slights are not really that big and not really that obvious, but they're just relentless and constant.
ELLEN PAO: For me it was hard because I had been raised to think of the world as a meritocracy. So I would be working really hard and doing my best, but I wouldn't be invited to a meeting. And it would be like a company that I had brought in to meet with the team and I would be shut out of it. And I'd wonder, well, you know, was it because my schedule was too busy? Did the entrepreneurs say something negative about me and not want me in the meeting? And you're trying to understand, like, what you did wrong. So I spent many, many years trying to figure out, like, what should I be doing better? How can I do a better job? And then, you know, I'd be asked to, you know, go get cookies in the middle of a meeting where we're having a massive negotiation.
And there was one offsite, where, you know, we had the entire partnership and at the end of the meeting one of the senior partners asked myself and another woman to take notes. And the other woman, it was like the last straw for her. And it seems kind of small, they were like, ‘Why is she getting so upset? Like, it's just taking notes, I'll go take the notes.” But it's like, she was upset because we were put in the back row. And then, you weren't called on, you were talked over, your ideas when you were able to get a chance to speak weren't acknowledged until somebody repeated them. And all of those things added up and she just said, ‘I am not taking notes.’ And took a stand there at the end of that meeting and I was paralyzed. I would have just taken the notes, but then I was like, I can't erode her stand. So I was just frozen there, and it was kind of a wake up call for me. Like how much am I willing to be complicit in this environment?
ABIGAIL DISNEY: There's also the catch-22 of how women are supposed to be and look.
ELLEN PAO: Yeah, I think the most jarring experience for me around that was when I got a–was just getting feedback and getting these performance reviews where the feedback would be so garbled, it would be like, ‘You need to be more, you need to speak up more. You need to own the room,’ was a phrase they used. I don't even know what it means to own the room. Like if everybody's owning the room, then who's the owner, right? Like then we're all talking over each other and we're all trying to dominate and you need to have some people who aren't dominant, you know, in order to have a conversation. But it was also like, ‘You're too sharp elbowed. You're too aggressive. You're too-’ You know, ‘You talk too much.’ So like, how do you take those two pieces of feedback and integrate them? So I was just like, well, what does that mean? Can you give me some concrete examples of when I did a bad job and what I should have done differently? This is feedback. I appreciate it. And I want to take it. I like feedback. I like being able to improve. I like doing better. So what am I supposed to actually do? And can you give me some specific examples? Because it seems inconsistent to me. And they went back and they weren't able to get any examples because it, you know, then I was like, well, it's more of an impression and a feeling than specific things that I need to do differently.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: Right. Do you think men ever get described as having sharp elbows? I really hate that expression so much.
ELLEN PAO: Oh, I know, like, what does that even mean? No, they're told they're go-getters and they're moving ahead and they're taking charge and they're–it's a leadership and a confidence and a visionary approach versus somebody who is, you know, stepping into a place they don't belong.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: It wasn't just the dreaded sharp elbows. Ellen also found herself at odds, culturally, with some of the people she was suddenly working with. The top partners of Kleiner Perkins were rich. Some of them were billionaires and their fixations, like buying multiple properties or planning for the apocalypse, were from a different world, a world that felt foreign to her, including, of course, a fixation on private jets.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: The private plane thing. Can you just maybe tell us a story or two about that?
ELLEN PAO: Yeah, I remember we were leaving and we got a call that this supermodel wanted a ride and to detour to New York. Just the idea, I was just like, ‘Oh my God, who would have the audacity to first hitch a ride and then detour the ride?’ So, I guess that's an entitlement of being a supermodel, but also like this idea of not wanting to fly with the public and, like that circle of interaction gets smaller and smaller as you get more and more wealthy.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: You know we should talk about billionaires because they're like a separate species in our society right now. They've crafted a universe in which they only live among others that share this idea of what wealth should look like and be, and I feel like they are having an impact on the rest of us socially by setting forth, kind of this example of entitlement, unquestioned entitlement.
ELLEN PAO: Yeah, and I think–I don't know. There was a guy I used to work with at one of the enterprise software companies I worked at, and he would talk about how he wanted a private jet, that was his goal in life. Like, I don't want to be with other humans. I think I deserve my own jet and I'm willing to burn like a hundred times more carbon in order to be able to have that status symbol and to have that access and to be by myself.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: And there was something else Ellen noticed her colleagues were fixated on. A certain type of person, someone who was very much not Ellen Pao.
ELLEN PAO: It was a very closed environment. It was very elitist. They wanted people with certain backgrounds. I just didn't fit in in the way that they wanted people to fit in. You know, and at one point they decided they wanted 26 year-old white men who could start companies and who had dropped out of school and had this kind of Mark Zuckerberg background. I didn't fit that profile and they didn't see me as relevant. I started seeing more of the problems I noticed early on and tried to help include more people from different backgrounds. But you get to a point where you realize, ‘Hey, they're not listening to me and they're not changing and they're not going to change.’ And you know, I realized, oh, it's actually my gender and race that are causing them to feel uncomfortable with me in general. It's not how I behave. It's really they just don't think that I'm what their impression of that 26 year old white man leading things is. And at that point I realized, wow, this is actually not a good place.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: This weird obsession with 26 year old men, it really emphasizes something that I've always believed, which is that private equity and hedge funds and VCs, are almost like, you know, the way baseball players are superstitious, and the idea of a 26 year old white guy in a hoodie that dropped out of college is a great example of that. Do you think?
ELLEN PAO: Yeah, I think it's that, but I think also they have so much power. They can take some random company with a random entrepreneur and make it successful through their relationships, through their ability to access funding for subsequent rounds and just through the power of their brands. So it is very interesting that you know, they can be so narrow minded and close minded with a fixed mindset about certain things, and yet have all this power and this ability to make things happen.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: Although, I wouldn't say that those things are necessarily unrelated. I mean, I think the power kind of draws you into a closed mindset. It's what you said. It's like this ever narrowing swath of humanity where the unanimity around values gets even more rigid. And the number of people you're exposed to gets smaller and smaller. And I think that there's also a vague disbelief about, are people really hungry or are they really working hard and then having to take two jobs there? There's disbelief about what poverty is like.
ELLEN PAO: And it goes back to like they're able to take some loser in a hoodie and make them rich and successful. Like why can't everybody else be like this loser in a hoodie and get rich and successful? Like, are they really trying? Because it seems to be so easy for these losers.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: Do you think things have changed since the lawsuit?
ELLEN PAO: I think attitudes have changed a lot. When I first sued, people didn’t understand what was happening. And this was before metoo. And I think people now understand that these really bad things are happening and that they are bad. I don't think we've gotten to the point where people are being held accountable the way they should be, where people are changing the systems that need to change to hold people accountable and to prevent these, you know, harassment and discrimination and all these other bad acts from happening. But I remember when I first sued and it became public, the New York Times ran this big piece on me. And they interviewed somebody who said, ‘I don't believe this is true, because we have never heard about anything like this before. How could it be happening if nobody is talking about it?’ Well, basically this is why nobody talks about it, because you're going to take them down and you're going to call them a bad employee, a complainer, a liar, because they are speaking up.
Cory Johnson on Bloomberg: In fact, the jury found opportunities had been kept from her because she was a crummy money manager.
NBC News Anchor: She and her husband are facing a great deal of debt. We suspect lawyers will suggest that's one of the motivations behind her $16 million lawsuit.
KPIX News Anchor: They say she had continued conflicts with staff and wasn't very good at her job.
ELLEN PAO: That was the standard playbook nine years ago when I sued and, you know, it worked pretty well.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: Why do you think the press laps that up completely?
ELLEN PAO: I think there are two things. The PR teams and the amount of money that Kleiner and these companies that are trying to take down the people who speak up, spend on manipulating the media is unreal. There were people all day long at my trial for PR for Kleiner Perkins, working the press the whole time. And then I think the second part is people like a villain. And I think there's also a gender aspect and potentially a race aspect where, you know, women are not seen as likable, women who succeed, you know, there've been studies that show that, powerful women are just viewed as less likable because people just don’t expect to see a woman in power and they don't feel comfortable with it. So that person, regardless of their personality, is less likable just by the fact of being a woman in power. And you know, I lost the trial, but I think it did change attitudes. I think people are much more cognizant of the types of harassment that happen in tech and in general. And for that I'm grateful to have been a part of it.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: By the time the trial rolled around Ellen was interim CEO at Reddit and it was there she made another controversial decision: to ban certain types of behavior on the platform. And she did. In particular, revenge porn and shutting down some of the most offensive subreddits. Reddit is a platform that prides itself on free speech. So Ellen and her team had to decide, ‘What is bad enough to ban?’ And she tried to focus on behaviors, on direct forms of harassment and abuse rather than ideas.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: I worry sometimes because as you look, start to look at Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and the heavy reliance on algorithms. We've watched these unintended consequences of misinformation and heavy, heavy bullying and the growth of white supremacy and all these things happening.
ELLEN PAO: Yeah.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: When you were at Reddit you made a distinction between harmful behaviors and the expression of ideas. Do you think that is still a useful distinction or do you think we need to go further?
ELLEN PAO: It's a starting point, right? The harassment, a lot of it is very crude right now. It's just a bunch of insults and threats and very violent imagery. So that piece, I feel like is a very easy thing to take down. I think we will need to get more sophisticated. I think there are ways that people push conversations off the platform that are very aggressive and it's designed to discourage speech. And we have to be able to understand, like this brigading where people gang up and start attacking every single comment on Reddit or every single tweet that you make on Twitter, that is, you know, harassing behavior because it's pushing people off a platform. And a lot of that is very easy to find and easy to tell and should be taken down. It's the same thing on Facebook, I assume. I haven't used Facebook in many, many years. I do think people need to be more disbelieving of a platform when they say it's too hard to take stuff down. Like they haven't tried and they don't want to try because it's harmful to their business models. One of the big myths about platforms is that it's too hard to figure out this behavior. You've got billions of comments or billions of posts and how can you monitor all of them? Well, once you set up rules and you make an effort and you kind of attack one section of it at a time, you can get rid of a lot of bad behavior. And then people see like, oh, they don't accept this behavior and they're going to ban me. So I'm not going to cross that line. So you end up without billions of posts with the disallowed behavior. You end up with very few of them because all of a sudden people understand the rules and they follow them. It's not that hard. And yet we continue to be flummoxed by these kind of messages that, oh, it's too hard and we need to protect free speech and we need to, you know, on and on, when it's really, you know, people harassing other people, people pushing people off the platform, that is not free speech. That's not an encouraging expression of ideas. It's just abusive.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: Do you think that it would be helpful to understand who threatens and bullies? Not as a question of violating privacy, but more as a question of like, should we understand the behavior better than we do?
ELLEN PAO: I struggle with this because, you know, I think I find all of those thought pieces on the alt-right, it's glorifying in many ways. And I find that really distracting and I find it not productive. Like we should be getting to the root of the behavior. And I'll tell you, like the people who harassed me when I was on Reddit and making a lot of these changes, they were from all over the place. They were, you know, yes, there's a set of the alt-right that is very white, very male, many young, but there are women who are not happy, like it's change. And it's also this behavior that we've come to learn to exhibit, which is we pile on and we climb onboard the harassment train and that's not coming from just a few people. Like now it's at scale. I think in the beginning there was just very small groups of people who are–and I think it's still true that the people who instigate this behavior, it's smaller groups and you can figure out who they are and start changing their behavior by enforcing your rules against them. And that will change the behavior of the rest of the platform. But when you look at who's doing a lot of the following on behavior, it's a broad swath of the community.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: While at Reddit, Ellen also found herself attempting to make changes to fix internal cultural problems to correct for the types of issues she had encountered in other male dominated startups, and of course at Kleiner Perkins. She hired more people of color and women to fill important roles in the company and worked hard to change the culture, but she still faced resistance.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: You know, there's a line in your book that's so interesting, where you say–things were getting hard at Reddit and some of your coworkers are sort of hard on you and you write, even so, you write, ‘Even if I wish they were less conservative and more accepting of women and diversity generally, they were nice.’
ELLEN PAO: Yep.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: I know what you're getting at here, because we've been told not to be mean. We've been told to continue to offer them the benefit of the doubt.
ELLEN PAO: I think it's also like I know so many of these people, I know the people who are harassing people. I've been in Silicon Valley for decades now. And a lot of these bad actors were friends of mine. And I can see why it's so hard for a board to fire CEO’s, to fire that VP of engineering or that individual contributor who's been with the company for so many years, because these are your friends, these are people like you've seen a very positive side of them. But it's so toxic if you don't, so I can empathize, but I also am so frustrated because you need to get over that. And it's like, everybody has a nice side. Everybody has some positive traits and we give in too often to that niceness, instead of thinking about the consequences and thinking about the people who had these horrible experiences.
I do think the younger generation, it is much more black and white often, where they see somebody as being all good or all bad. And I think social media has a big role in that, where you have this toxicity that builds up and you have the kind of reinforcing silos of folks in Facebook groups or elsewhere, where they're just kind of taking that idea and making it more and more extreme for attention.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: Do you think it's harder to change a culture than to start a culture off right?
ELLEN PAO: Yes. Yes. Especially if you've got a set of white male founders who are building this traditional startup where they look at the schools you went to, the relationships that you have, what fraternity you're at. Those are things that are built into the structure of the tech industry. And if you are trying to change it, it's very hard because now you need to change everybody's attitudes. You need to tell everybody that this is actually not allowed anymore. And our company is going to change, take a different approach, and people have a hard time with that. From the board level down to the individual employee who is used to being able to say, well, hostile things, to harass their coworkers, to favor their male friends and people get used to that culture. They joined because of that culture and they don't want it to change. We saw at Reddit, we had this culture, it was founded by these white guys and it was kind of a free for all. And as we went in to change it, it was really hard. People didn't even want to have a mobile app. They were like, no, everybody uses the laptops and their desktops. You know, they're not going to want to use Reddit on a mobile device. It took like a year to start showing like, ‘Hey, people who use technology are using it on mobile and we need to have a mobile app for this product.’ It was like this big cultural thing. We just want to promote the experiences that we have had and that we enjoy and that we experience. And we don't really care about anybody else.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: How much are we going to need CEOs to be on board with change for change to happen? Do we need them?
ELLEN PAO: I think CEOs are key to these changes. The example we have in the tech industry is when you have, usually, a really strong engineer, often you let them get away with a lot of bad behavior because you need that engineer to ship your product on time to make changes to the product. They may have built a lot of your technology, so only they can fix problems in it, they know where to go to make the changes and they become this untouchable person. Where people are a little bit scared of them, like, ‘What if they leave, then we can't do anything.’ And if this engineer has harassed somebody the head of engineering is going to say, ‘Well, I can't ship if I fire this person.
So I don't want to fire this person.’ It's up to the CEO to say, ‘Hey, okay, we're going to take a risk to the ship date. And we're going to protect this employee and we're going to hold this engineer accountable for their bad actions.’ And if the CEO's not on board, they'll make the easier decision, which is to push out the person who raised the issue. And that just causes more and more problems because then it's like, oh, if you're a great engineer, part of being a great engineer is harassing other people.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: Yeah, that becomes what an engineer looks like.
ELLEN PAO: It's so hard because people aspire to be good. You know, if you said, ‘Are you going to let a harasser stay on your team?’ No CEO would say yes, but how many harassers are on these teams?
ABIGAIL DISNEY: Do you think this culture is a little too credulous of the benign CEO, the CEO that's got our best world in his head, or do you think people are starting to be wise to the idea that maybe CEOs aren't necessarily to be all that trusted with our future? I know you hear my dogs and they're really loud and there's nothing I can do.
ELLEN PAO: Oh, that's my dog in the background.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: Oh, that's your dog. I was just assuming it was my dog.
ELLEN PAO: Sorry. Yeah. Some people are getting wise. When you look at congressional hearings
House Committee on the Judiciary Hearing, July 2020:
Rep. David Cicciline: The purpose of today's hearing is to examine the dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.
House Financial Services Committee Hearing, October 2019:
Rep. Maxine Waters: This hearing is entitled, an examination of Facebook...
ELLEN PAO: There was definitely a lot of skepticism in the questions and in the treatment of the CEOs of these big tech companies who were coming to defend the lack of action in taking care of the harm that happens on their platforms.
House Financial Services Committee Hearing, October 2019:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: So you won't take down lies or you will take down lies? I think it's just a pretty simple, yes or no. I'm not talking about spin, I'm talking about actual disinformation.
Mark Zuckerberg: Yes, in most cases in a democracy, I believe that people should be able to see for themselves what politicians that they may or may not vote for are saying and judge their character–
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: So you won't take them down?
Mark Zuckerberg: –for themselves.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: So you won't take, you may flag that it's wrong, but you won't take it down?
ELLEN PAO: In the beginning though, it was a huge admiration fest, where everybody aspired to be like them. You know, people going into tech instead of going into investment banking because it became the fastest way to make a million dollars or a billion dollars. And I think some of that–it's still there where people are like, ‘Oh, it's so exciting that Jeff Bezos is going into space.’ Like, who cares? If I had a hundred billion dollars, I could send anybody into space, right? It's not that impressive, but people are all enamored by him. I think there's not enough attention paid to the fact that his billions and billions and billions of dollars were made on the backs of people who can't earn a living wage working at Amazon. Who aren't given breaks to go to the bathroom, who are forced to grind harder and harder to live up to the ever more stringent expectations of how much you can accomplish delivering packages or boxing up goods. Like there's not enough attention paid to the fact that he doesn't seem to care. He's more than happy to do some PR push to donate some money to a school or to a homeless project without actually thinking about the systemic problems that he's causing. Amazon now employs almost a million people in the United States.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: Yeah. He could give every one of them a thousand dollars and still have over a hundred billion dollars. The pushback I often get when I talk about how companies should just do better by their employees and settle for less money on the upside. What you get is, ‘But philanthropy, they do philanthropy.’
ELLEN PAO: I know it's ridiculous. He has the lives of a million people, their work salaries and their quality of work life in his hands and he's not done the right thing. What makes us think that him giving away money without any kind of controls or oversight is going to result in good decisions being made for society at large? It makes no sense.
*dog barks*
If you can wait a second, I'm going to give her a bone and hopefully she'll be quiet for the rest of this, one second. All right, I'm back. Sorry about that.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: Okay. So, optimism. I'm just curious what you're optimistic about. Is there anything that feels like it's headed in the right direction?
ELLEN PAO: I'm just so excited about the fact that workers are organizing.
CNBC News Anchor: Silicon Valley and big tech, which have both long been averse to the formation of unions among workers are starting to feel the pressure in 2021.
Brent Jabbour on Boom Bust: Hundreds of employees at Google have partnered with one of the nation's largest unions to organize for the first time.
ELLEN PAO: And they’re so effective.
Emily Chang on Bloomberg Technology: We saw Amazon protesting their, their shareholder diversity rule. We've seen Microsoft employees protesting their work with the US government.
ELLEN PAO: That, you know, they're able to change the behavior of Amazon.
KTVU News Anchor: Amazon workers are walking off the job to protest the company's environmental impact. CEO Jeff Bezos announced yesterday that the company will follow the 2016 Paris climate agreement. But some Amazon workers say this is not enough.
ELLEN PAO: That they're able to call Google out for how they're treating the team who are working on trying to make our algorithms fair.
Amy Goodman on Democracy Now: Google employees are demanding senior leadership reinstate prominent black researcher, Timnit Gebru, who alleged she was fired after arguing tech companies should do more to ensure gender biased and racist language are not exacerbated by artificial intelligence systems
ELLEN PAO: So the fact that, you know, we're able to get people to understand that this behavior is wrong and then to organize around it and it's forcing companies to listen, I think that's really powerful. I think the fact that this new generation is much more oriented around values and inclusion is incredibly powerful. It's like 75% graduating from school think diversity and inclusion are very important in the workplace. And it's not just people from historically marginalized groups. It's, you know, the white men who think that inclusion is important and who want to see it in the workplace, and don't want to go to a company that favors their own demographics. So the world is going to change. And the question is are today's leaders able to break out of that fixed mindset and embrace change, or are they just going to get pushed out and be replaced by this younger generation, ahead of their time. And maybe if they can't get on board, maybe that is not such a bad thing. Maybe it's actually what we need.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: Yeah. You know, I like that your optimism is about the oldest technology in the world, which is collective action. That's when humankind has always pushed us all forward in the best possible ways. So I really appreciate, Ellen, your taking the time today, because it's been so interesting to talk to you.
ELLEN PAO: Oh, I really enjoyed this conversation. Like you're thinking about these hard issues.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: Ellen's book is Reset: My Fight For Inclusion and Lasting Change. These days you can find her advocating for diversity and inclusion at Project Include or on Twitter @EKP.
ELLEN PAO: Thank you so much for having me.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: Yeah, such a pleasure.
ABIGAIL DISNEY: All Ears is a production of Fork Films. The show is produced by Alexis Pancrazi and Christine Schomer. Wren Farrell is our Assistant Producer. This episode was engineered by Florence Barrau-Adams. Bob Golden composed our theme music. The podcast team also includes VP of production, Aideen Kane. Our executive producer is Kathleen Hughes. Learn more about the podcast on our website forkfilms.com. And don’t forget to rate, review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.