Pao’s book, published two years after a difficult eight-month stint as chief executive of Reddit, gives her a platform to speak on diversity in tech, the focus of her advisory group Project Include. If the personal is political, then Reset is as political as it gets ... There is a temptation to compare Pao with Sandberg. Both are Silicon Valley authors addressing the barriers that women face in scaling the corporate ladder; both are wealthy and privileged beyond the dreams of most. Yet the books are very different. While Sandberg implores women to ask for the pay rise and push ahead, Pao sets out why this probably won’t be enough. She also addresses the intersection of race and gender throughout, something that Sandberg did not focus on ... Pao is a compelling narrator, sharing intimate stories such as her endometriosis and worries about conceiving, yet her manner is always restrained and businesslike — occasionally to a fault ... Only a few times does the book veer into preaching, such as when she recounts how her consciousness was raised by conversations she had about race in the Caribbean while on honeymoon. The fact that Pao lost her case poses a problem for the reader. Either you accept that the system is rigged or you discount everything the author has claimed. After reading this book, I am inclined to believe the former.

Pao writes with an incisive anger that has been throttled so long that its emergence is, by turn, startling and uncomfortable—and a great relief. Of course she is angry! ... If Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In has been the handbook for the rising female executive over the last decade, Ellen Pao’s book is its logical companion and should be read alongside it as a staple in every business course. There are many who will attempt to pit these perspectives against each other, suggesting that they attempt to advance different forms of feminism. I would say the opposite: Sandberg and Pao are products of similar environments, having graduated from Harvard Business School just three years apart. When confronted with the alarming realities of negotiating gender and race in the tech industry, they each hit upon different strategies for succeeding ... These are just three of many women who have spoken up this year, demanding fair treatment across the tech industry. They’re less afraid of retribution than they once were, and they’re more certain of the strength of their own voices to force a public reckoning in Silicon Valley. Among tech circles, there’s a name for this. It’s The Pao Effect.

Reset contains a fair amount of repetition — 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 ... 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 ... 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.

As much I want to give Pao the benefit of knowing exactly what her book is about, I most appreciate the parts where she doesn’t seem to know her point at all—the parts where her streaks of color peek out from the confines of the thesis. These quick glances into her personhood overthrew any and all previous notions I had about Pao from a period when many Reddit-adjacent millennials inhaled vengeful memes and inflammatory thinkpieces about her … For someone who is constantly told she has sharp elbows, Pao delivers a rare and raw softness. It isn’t a forced vulnerability; if anything, it is the purest, most untouched vulnerability I’ve seen expressed in words.

Pao’s book is most astute when it portrays a subtler form of discrimination ... Whether complaining about sexism or wondering if an investment is a smart bet, Pao and women like her are stuck with the unfun roles of ballbuster and buzzkiller. She was excoriated by her colleagues for complaining all the time — and also for not complaining early and often enough ... Reset would have benefited from a more direct and nuanced discussion of the criticisms of Pao’s case. Much of the case centered on Pao’s relationship with another partner, which she says began with his harassment of her, evolved into a consensual affair and wound up with his retaliation against her professionally. Pao doesn’t delve into her perspective on an email she sent to the firm’s leadership urging that the partner not be fired ... At the end of the book, Pao notes that she has formed Project Include to fight underrepresentation of women and people of color in tech. It’s better than nothing, but meanwhile, those in power look pretty much the same — or worse.

In her new book, Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change, Pao describes herself as a 'dutiful daughter' of immigrants who excelled at Princeton and Harvard, where she picked up law and business degrees, and then headed west for the tech gold rush ... Pao unravels the slow accumulation of slights and outrages she endured. What she saw included, by her account, boorish, obvious sexism ... Reset would have benefited from a more direct and nuanced discussion of the criticisms of Pao’s case ... At the end of the book, Pao notes that she has formed Project Include to fight underrepresentation of women and people of color in tech. It’s better than nothing, but meanwhile, those in power look pretty much the same — or worse.

Writing in relatable terms, with little jargon, Pao draws on statistics to demonstrate the industry’s lack of inclusivity and weaves in amusing analogies, as with her comparison of tech executives’ fascination with private jets to high school students’ obsession with owning a car. Though Pao lost the lawsuit, she went on to serve as interim CEO of Reddit and founded Project Include, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting diversity in tech. Her story is a grave reminder of how far the tech industry has to go in fighting discrimination.