{"id":11538,"date":"2016-06-09T11:24:15","date_gmt":"2016-06-09T15:24:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=11538"},"modified":"2016-06-09T11:24:15","modified_gmt":"2016-06-09T15:24:15","slug":"ellen-pao-is-a-woman-of-color","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2016\/06\/09\/ellen-pao-is-a-woman-of-color\/","title":{"rendered":"Ellen Pao is a “woman of color”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Six different readers emailed with news of\u00a0Ellen Pao’s book project. This answers to some extent the question that I asked in\u00a0“Ellen Pao\u2019s new job?”<\/a>\u00a0(but it does cast some doubt on the merits of her lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins; if she were in fact a competent venture capitalist and therefore had sufficient skills to beat the S&P 500 by investing in young companies, why wouldn’t she have been snapped up by some greedy investors looking for yield?) It comes close to answering\u00a0What should Ellen Pao\u2019s forthcoming book be titled?<\/a>\u00a0(July 2015)<\/p>\n

What I found most interesting in this Jezebel piece on Pao’s new book<\/a> is the statement from the publisher: “one of the few visible, prominent women of color who have reached the C-suite in corporate America.”<\/p>\n

The “corporate America” phrase is\u00a0interesting because Reddit had\u00a0roughly $8 million per year in revenue<\/a> while Ms. Pao was CEO. By that revenue standard, the manager\u00a0of three McDonald’s franchises would also qualify (Forbes<\/a><\/em>) as a member of the corporate America C-suite. (Compare to Rosalind Brewer<\/a>, responsible for $57 billion in sales at Sam’s Club.)<\/p>\n

An Asian-American qualifying for the “women of color” category is yet more interesting because it shows the evolution of victimhood in our society. About 20 years ago a Korean-American friend was denied membership in a Harvard Law School Women of Color group. Today she would be able to join?<\/p>\n

Title ideas from the July 2015 reader comments:<\/p>\n