How Ellen Pao lost her job but survived Reddit's swamp of trolls

Silicon Valley's most controversial executive has personified the discrimination and harassment directed at women in technology and on the internet. A look back at her landmark gender lawsuit and her ouster at Reddit reveals how much - and how little - has changed

When Ellen Pao took the witness stand four months ago, accusing the most powerful venture-capital firm in the most powerful new industry of pervasive sexism against her and powerful women like her, she talked about the "right path".

Pao's own attorney asked the 46-year-old executive why she continued to fight Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the firm that accused her of being a bad employee, even as she had become the top executive at Reddit, the influential social-media website that is infamous for nothing if not its trolls. The site's former contributors - Pao now among them - describe it as a kind of misogynist fire swamp where "harassment swarms", even and especially for an accidental feminist champion like its suddenly former CEO.