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Reddit's head of community, Jessica Moreno, has left the company. She is the fourth senior female employee to exit in less than a month.
Moreno and her husband, former Reddit product boss Dan McComas, joined the company in 2011 when their gift-exchange service, RedditGifts, was acquired by Reddit. Reddit and Moreno confirmed news of the departure to Re/code in separate statements provided by the company, saying that Moreno plans to return to Salt Lake City to spend time with her family. Neither Moreno nor Reddit specified who would replace her, but Moreno said she's "working with [CEO] Steve [Huffman] on a transition plan."
In her statement, Moreno didn't mention anything related to gender discrimination. Her exit is the latest by a female higher-up at the social news site at a time when the company's efforts to rein in the most toxic elements of its community have been in the spotlight.
Human group dynamics are mysterious. Did Moreno leave because there is real gender discrimination at Reddit that she's reacting to, or is it a lemming effect, where some will jump off the cliff because the one ahead of them in line did? Or is she a statistical quirk, having had her company acquired by Reddit and now deciding to move on, and the world reads deeper meaning into it because of the timing?
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Thursday July 30 2015, @07:26AM
Or perhaps it's just coincidence that a few people left. Or maybe it's just that when Pao went a few others decided they wanted a change as well, nothing more.
Even for Soylent, there is some wild speculation here.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Thursday July 30 2015, @07:30AM
One needs the statistics of how many (proportionately) male employees left in the same period, to say there is a correlation male vs female; and one would need historical data to say that there is a particular increase in retirements.
One would need to see the pay structure/banding structure of the employees to understand seniority (for example, in a dotcom with relatively small number of employees, everyone can be "head of something".
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2015, @08:13AM
and one needs a representative statistics about this from other companies as well, to say whether any possible correlation is specific to Reddit.
(Score: 2) by kadal on Thursday July 30 2015, @08:18PM
Isn't Reddit too small for any meaningful statistic?
(Score: 5, Funny) by aristarchus on Thursday July 30 2015, @07:40AM
Coincidence? I plan on tendering my resignation next week, and I don't even have a position at Reddit! But it is just like when I resigned from Slashdot, where I was a loyal lurker who never actually signed up for a username, but as soon a beta hit the wall, I was like, outta there! And Google, when they wanted me to link all my various personas to a single identity (more to the question, how did they know to ask?), I was just out of there. Or at least created more identities via proxies. And now Microsoft, the great daemon itself, wants me (well, not me, but people I know who were foolish enough to buy machines with more recent versions of the plague on them) to do much the same, give my details, let M$ store all my info in a cloud. . . but as Odysseus said, is this Juno, or just a cloud, send by Hades to confuse my mind?
OK. the take-away you get from leveraging the drill-down: corporations that try to make money be managing communities will fail. Always fail. They are lucky if they can fail without the torches and pitchforks, the tar and feathers, or a nice golden parachute. But they will always fail. Gandhi said that, you know.
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Thursday July 30 2015, @09:01AM
The story was included, not for the speculation which was mentioned by the submitter (and, I believe, balanced by the suggestion of alternative views) but because we also report events in the Business market which might be significant. When we post we get criticised for discussing the events that are occurring and, when we don't, we get asked why we are 'blocking' or ignoring specific stories.
However, it does seem that there have been changes in a rather high proportion of executive posts in Reddit over the last few weeks - something for which I cannot find a match in similar companies over the same period - so it is possible that Reddit's woes are not yet over.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mojo chan on Thursday July 30 2015, @10:50AM
The story is fine, it's the way the summary wildly speculates that is the problem. The summaries don't need to add commentary, and TFA should be a neutral one free from such speculation as well.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday July 30 2015, @12:08PM
Ah, OK. I thought that Phoenix666 had balanced sufficiently it to make it neutral. I'm sure he will take note.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kurenai.tsubasa on Thursday July 30 2015, @12:52PM
Or maybe she left to help build this narrative that techies assigned the male gender at birth are a bunch of misogynerds actively trying to keep women out of tech.
What's the point of that narrative, though? How does that drive down wages? We know the evidence shows that for college graduates, at least, the gender pay gap is about the size of a rounding error. Any ideas, folks?
Maybe my tinfoil's just on a bit tight.