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Hey everybody, I'm Jean Chatsky. Thank you so much for joining me today on her money.

I'm very excited for this conversation that we are about to have because I am talking with someone who's really paved the way for women in tech, which as many of you know,

is a field that has inspired a lot of innovation and a lot of progress but has also historically been regressive when it comes to diversity.

And inclusion, Bell and Powell experienced this firsthand as a partner at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm,

Kleiner Perkins, where she and other female colleagues were cut out of important meetings and email discussions and left out of networking opportunities and

punished for speaking out about their treatment. All of this led Ellen to file a gender discrimination lawsuit against the firm in 2012.

The trial sparked a national conversation around sexism and tech forcing companies to take a good hard look at their treatment of female employees and giving a platform for women in tech to speak up.

That spark has now been called the pow effect Ellen went on to become interim CEO at Reddit where she cracked down on misogyny and harassment on the platform and in 2016 she and seven other women leaders in tech founded project include,

which is a not for profit organization that uses research and advocacy to increase diversity and inclusion in their field and beyond most recently she wrote the book reset my fight for inclusion and lasting change it chronicles her efforts to make workplaces better for women better for people of color.

Ellen I'm very excited to talk to you about your experiences where we sit now and how we can create some real lasting change as we head into 2023 it's nice to see you.

Thank you so much for having me and what a great conversation to have at it such a difficult time it is a difficult time it's continued to be a difficult time particularly for women.

And you've had a long career in tech you've been at the very top of the leadership ladder where do you think that we sit right now where are we what kind of a grade would you give us.

Oh I feel like we've made some progress so we're not failing but I do think the word that you used regressive is so perfect to describe this time I feel like we've made some progress we've had you know the second wave of me to we've had more.

More women leaders who are black and Latinx and Asian and indigenous but all of a sudden now there's so much pushback you know it comes with Elon Musk taking over Twitter and deciding oh it's a free for all if you want to criticize and harass people from these marginalized identities so it's not really free speech it's more like this return to all of the hate and the discrimination that we've always experienced and now in and even blatant way right.

We now know that there is discrimination we now know that there are systems that are making it harder for people from different groups to succeed and there's a certain group of people saying like that's good and we want to preserve that and now we're up against that in a much more blatant and open way.

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