Ellen Pao Books in Order

Ellen Pao was born in New Jersey and grew up in Maplewood, the middle of three daughters. Her father taught mathematics and her mother worked as an engineer, and school was treated as serious business at home. Those early influences connected Pao to both technical work and the high expectations that would shape her career.

She studied electrical engineering at Princeton, then earned a law degree at Harvard Law School. After working as a corporate lawyer in New York, she returned to Harvard for an MBA. The path gave her three useful toolkits, technical training, legal reasoning, and business practice, before she made Silicon Valley her professional home.

Pao worked in business development at technology companies, including WebTV and BEA Systems, before joining the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins in 2005. Her work there involved technology and health-care investments. She later alleged that women and people from underrepresented groups were treated differently at the firm, particularly in access, advancement, and the informal networks that can shape a career.

In 2012, she filed a lawsuit alleging gender discrimination and retaliation.

The case reached trial in 2015, and the jury decided against Pao. Still, the proceedings gave a wide public audience to concerns many women had described privately in technology and finance. Pao's experience was not a neat victory story, and she has not presented it that way. It was a costly, public fight that changed the direction of her career and sharpened her interest in practical workplace reform.

Alongside the lawsuit, Pao joined Reddit and eventually served as its interim chief executive from late 2014 to 2015. Her tenure came with intense scrutiny, including backlash over company decisions and content policies. It also placed her at the center of questions about online harassment, management, and what responsibility a large platform has to its users and staff.

That period became the backbone of Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change, published in 2017. In the memoir, Pao ties together her upbringing, her career, the Kleiner Perkins case, and her time at Reddit. The book looks closely at the everyday mechanics of exclusion, who gets information, sponsorship, credit, and a chance to recover from mistakes, rather than treating bias as a problem caused only by a few obvious villains.

She writes as someone who knows how systems can hide in plain sight.

Readers drawn to Reset often come for a firsthand account of a headline-making case, but stay for Pao's direct discussion of work culture. She focuses on the gap between public promises and daily behavior, and on the ways data, policies, and accountability can make inclusion more than a slogan. Her subject is serious, but her aim is practical: naming patterns, explaining their impact, and asking people with power to change them.

Pao co-founded Project Include, a nonprofit focused on diversity and inclusion in the technology industry, and her work has included investing and advocacy. Her public work remains connected to the questions at the heart of Reset: who gets heard at work, who gets opportunities, and what it takes to build fairer institutions.