NONSENSE. SHE CAN BLAME SEXISM AND RACISM AND PLENTY OF PEOPLE WILL BACK HER JUST BECAUSE. Reddit’s Ellen Pao Can Only Blame Herself.

I’d like to focus on something that hasn’t been as well explored: the poor job Ellen Pao did running Reddit.

I don’t say that lightly. I’m usually the first one to throw shade when writers who have never managed any project larger than getting themselves to back-to-back press conferences in different parts of town start proclaiming that they know exactly what a CEO should have done. My general feeling is that these people should go spend three months as the manager of a marginally profitable Chik-fil-A franchise, and report back on how easy it is to run a business.

Also — perhaps because of my extensive experience as a woman writing about business and politics — I am convinced that women have a handicap when they’re doing a traditionally “male” job. They are resented by both men and women for stating firm opinions and refusing to back down. Their competence is more quickly questioned. They seem to attract wildly disproportionate anger compared with men who say and do the same things . And indeed, during her time at Reddit, Ellen Pao seems to have endured the same sort of abuse that us ladies on the Internet are used to getting when we make people mad. So I am inclined toward sympathy.

Yet, it is also true that under her brief leadership, Reddit seems to have careened from disaster to disaster, and not just because Ellen Pao’s a woman and people watch female CEOs more closely.

If you’ve got a troubled company, you might want to think twice about hiring a female or minority CEO, since if they perform poorly it will be harder, and more costly, to fire them. These are the incentives that the “social justice” crowd has created.