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Pao’s maternal grandparents are Yu-Wen Lee and Ching-Hsin (née Liu) Lee, who were from Baoding in the Hebei province near Beijing. Pao’s maternal grandfather was a graduate of the Republic of China Military Academy, He later went on to serve as a commander in the Chinese Civil War under Chiang Kai-shek and, in 1948, moved the family to Taiwan, where he retired with the rank of Colonel in 1960. In October 1972, his wife and daughter Elizabeth moved to the New York City area to join Pao’s mother and aunt and uncle who were already studying in the US. Yu-Wen Lee was the fourth child of his father, merchant Lien-Ren Lee, Pao's great grandfather.

Pao subsequently founded the non-profit organization Project Include with Erica Baker, Tracy Chou, Freada Kapor Klein and four other women in the technology industry. Aimed at startups with 25 to 1,000 employees, the group develops human resources advice in a series of meetings with clients and publishes anonymized progress reports under a Creative Commons license. Reports on the aftermath of Pao v. Kleiner Perkins included speculation that Pao had agreed not to write a book detailing her experiences at the company. In November 2015, Pao revealed that this was not the case and later confirmed that she was writing a memoir. In a May 2016 interview, Pao stated that she planned to finish the book before seeking a full-time job. One month later, the book was acquired by Spiegel and Grau and given the title Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change. The book has been shortlisted for the 2017 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.

Following the trial, Kleiner Perkins sought $972,814 in legal costs and offered to withdraw the fee if Pao declined to appeal the verdict. On June 1, 2015, Pao filed to appeal, one week before the deadline. On June 5, Kleiner Perkins claimed that Pao wanted $2.7 million to not appeal, an amount which they called "improper and excessive". The judge ruled on June 18 that Pao would only be responsible for $275,966 citing the economic resources of both parties under the Fair Employment and Housing Act. Pao filed an objection to this with the argument that an award against the plaintiff could result in a chilling effect on future discrimination cases. On September 10, 2015, Pao wrote a guest post for Re/code in which she urged companies to be more open about bias accusations made by their employees. The post stated that she was deciding not to appeal but still paying $276,000 due to an additional stipulation by Kleiner Perkins that the fee could only be waived after signing a non-disparagement agreement. However, one week later when Pao formally dropped her appeal, Kleiner Perkins filed to close the case without payment per its original announcement.

On June 10, 2015, a post on Reddit, signed by Pao and two other executives, announced that five subreddits were being banned for fostering off-site harassment. One such community had over 150,000 subscribers. Multiple change.org petitions calling for Pao's resignation were created by displeased Reddit users and the most popular one reached 10,000 signatures in the days following the change. Some users began posting hateful comments and images about Pao on Reddit and other websites. Other complaints about the site focused on inadequate moderation tools and the fact that some posts critical of Ellen Pao's lawsuit had been deleted by moderators.

Pao joined Reddit in 2013 as the head of business development and strategic partnerships. One of her first investments made in this capacity strengthened the ties between Reddit and its de facto image host Imgur. She stated that a goal for the following year was making it easier for people to become Redditors. Pao became interim CEO in November 2014 after Yishan Wong resigned. Following efforts by Wong to scale back salary negotiation, Pao decided to give two final offers (one with more cash, one with more equity) to all prospective employees. As motivation for the change, she cited findings that women were more likely to be penalized for attempting to negotiate pay. After seeing that Reddit's previous offers were not correlated with gender, Pao stated that the new policy was still the fairest, as well as a stepping stone to having publicly posted salaries. One of the largest changes to the website made under Pao was the banning of revenge porn in March 2015. Other social networks, that removed such images in the following months, have been widely referred to as following Reddit's model. In June and July 2015, Pao was the subject of criticism and harassment by Reddit users after five Reddit communities (subreddits) were banned for harassment and Reddit's director of talent was fired. A Change.org petition requesting her removal reached 200,000 signatures and on July 10, it was announced that Pao had resigned from Reddit "by mutual agreement".

Since becoming known, in 2012, for filing an unsuccessful gender discrimination suit against former employer Kleiner Perkins, Pao has expressed vocal criticism of the hiring and promotion practices in Silicon Valley. In 2015, unpopular decisions made during Pao's tenure at Reddit generated a wave of controversy that culminated in her stepping down. The backlash she received sparked debates both on the treatment of women in technology and the need for transparency in a company that relies on volunteers.

On May 10, 2012, Pao filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against her employer. The lawsuit alleged workplace retaliation by a male junior partner, resulting from his and Pao's romantic affair. She continued to work at the firm until October 1. Pao claimed that she was terminated abruptly while Kleiner Perkins claimed that she was given a month to accept a paid five-month transition to an operating role. Pao's lawyer said she was fired in retaliation for her lawsuit and amended the complaint to add that cause of action. The firm said Pao was terminated for performance reasons unrelated to the lawsuit. On March 27, 2015, the jury decided the case in favor of the defendant on all counts.

On May 10, 2012, Pao filed a gender discrimination suit against Kleiner Perkins which went to trial in late February 2015. It was covered by the national media and elicited broad comment regarding the issues raised. The case was live blogged and tweeted constantly, to the point of providing both humorous and serious feedback to lawyers and witnesses. The trial, lasting 24 days, resulted in a favorable verdict for Kleiner Perkins.

Pao married Roger Kuo. They later divorced. She then married Buddy Fletcher. They met through Aspen Institute functions during the summer of 2007, after they were both appointed Crown Fellows. Pao and Fletcher have one daughter. Pao is a vegetarian.

In 2005, Pao joined Kleiner Perkins, an established venture capital firm in San Francisco, as technical chief of staff for John Doerr, a senior partner, a job that required degrees in engineering, law, and business and experience in enterprise software. In 2007 she was appointed a Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute on the recommendation of Doerr, a trustee. Also in 2007, she became a junior investing partner with Ted Schlein as her boss. While at Kleiner Perkins, Pao led the company's expansion into China. After several years with Schlein's team, Pao was passed over for a senior partner position. According to Pao, she had the job title of junior partner from her date of hiring and was promised an opportunity to move into an investing role. Doerr, who has expressed awareness of what he considers a gender gap at venture capital firms, mentored Pao, liberally providing feedback, but, in the end, agreed with the other senior partners who had made negative evaluations of her work at the firm. It was Pao's contention, in her suit for gender discrimination, that men with similar profiles were, nevertheless, promoted.

From 1994 to 1996, Pao worked as a corporate attorney at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. In 1998, Pao worked at WebTV. Pao worked at several companies in Silicon Valley including BEA Systems as Senior Director of Corporate Business Development from 2001 until 2005.

Pao graduated from Princeton University, the alma mater of her two sisters, with a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering in 1991. Immediately after, she attended Harvard Law School, where she earned a Juris Doctor in 1994. After two years of working, Pao returned to attend Harvard Business School, where she received an MBA in 1998.

Ellen Kangru Pao (born 1970) is an American investor and activist who co-founded the diversity consulting non-profit organization Project Include. She was previously a partner at Kapor Capital and the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at the Kapor Center for Social Impact before leaving in 2018 to focus on her role as Project Include's CEO. Other positions she has held include interim CEO of social media technology company Reddit, investment partner at Kleiner Perkins, board director at Flipboard, and corporate attorney at Cravath, Swaine & Moore.

Ellen Pao was born in 1970 in New Jersey. She is the middle child of three daughters born to Tsyh-Wen Pao and Young-Ping Pao, immigrants from Taiwan. Her father, Young-Ping Pao, was a professor at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Her mother, Tsyh-Wen Pao (née Lee) worked as an engineer in computer sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Ellen Pao is fluent in English and Mandarin and first learned to code from her mother at age ten. The Pao family raised their children in Maplewood, New Jersey. Young-Ping Pao died in 1987 when Ellen was in the 12th grade of high school.