In the spirit of Reddit and /r/conspiracy, maybe Pao wants to be the only successful woman there, so she can make her narrative more believable that the tech world hates women by pointing out how there aren't women at Reddit.

Your post seems quite accurate but I'd like to point out that one thing often mentioned about misogyny on the internet is that it's 'powerful' women that get the most hate. 'Powerful' women and authority figures get grief. And women in helper roles do not.

So your statement is correct but perhaps people's attitudes to gender still influences their response to Pao.

Food for thought

Wouldn't a simpler explanation be that powerful/authority figures, regardless of gender, always get the most grief? I think there's a misattribution error occurring here: the amount of grief one receives is not a function of gender, it is a function of 'power'.

That seems more logical to me. If you're in a powerful position, you have to 'own' unpopular decisions. And the decisions of those higher up affect larger numbers of people. Meaning that there's a higher probability of receiving a hateful email from the 1 crank in a group affected by a decision you made.

There are a number of studies testing this, and the consensus that emerges from meta-analysis is that women tend to be liked, or respected, but rarely both. Cuddy (2005) is the citation I've memorized for this.

In contrast, men have no problem being liked and respected in positions of power. Women managers tend to be viewed as nurturing pushovers or bitches.

It would indeed be simpler if liking decreased as social distance increased, but the world is not always so simple, and a thousand years of gender stereotypes and oppression don't end in a century.

> it's 'powerful' women that get the most hate

On the contrary, compare her reception to that of powerful men who behave badly, and she seems to be benefiting from favorable treatment. Powerful men who have attracted the internet's ire by abusing the legal system with frivolous lawsuits, such as Darl McBride, Jack Thompson, or Charles Carreon, have attracted a lot more hate than Pao, and that's just for their legal hijinks, not to mention that they didn't do anything approaching what's happening to Reddit.

Furthermore, I have a hard time seeing why the powerful deserve special sympathy, especially when compared to the non-powerful.

Pao gets hate because she's incompetent, vain, and an ass. Ballmer got hate, too. You know why? Because he's incompetent, vain, and an ass. There are two intersecting patterns here: first, that vain, incompetent asses get hate; second, that most of the people in positions of power are vain, incompetent asses. Maybe people tend to notice more often when they're women, but the men aren't any different and they get plenty of well-deserved hate too.

On reddit, an admin has more power than the overwhelming majority of users. There are seriously only a handful of people on reddit that had more power than Victoria had.