Reddit’s Chief Engineer Bethanye Blount Resigns In Less Than 2 Months, Hints At Gender Discrimination In The Company

Having served at Reddit for less than two months, the social news site’s chief engineer Bethanye Blount has quit the company. Her decision to leave the high profile online community came after interim CEO Ellen Pao left the company.

Blount, who was a former employee of Facebook, confirmed her exit from the company to Re/Code. In an interview with the publication, Blount said she had lost confidence in the new direction of the company and her decision to move on was not directly linked to Pao’s exit.

Blount told Re/Code that she left the company as she thought she would not be able to deliver on promises being made to the community. “Along the way, there are some very aggressive implied promises being made to the community — in comments to mods, quotes from board members — and they’re going to have some pretty big challenges in meeting those implied promises,” the Re/Code report quoted Blount as saying.

With her resignation, Blount becomes the third top level female executive to quit the company within the past two weeks. Prior to her resignation, Victoria Taylor, who was Reddit’s director of talent was fired on July 2. Soon after that, Pao resigned.

Blount also hinted at the existence of gender discrimination in the company. According to her, Pao had been placed on a "glass cliff," a term used to describe female employees being set up for failure by assigning them leadership roles during critical situations. However, she told Re/Code that her decision to leave Reddit was not directly related to her gender.

“Bethanye’s departure had nothing to do with gender, and I was looking forward to working with her,” Steve Huffman, Reddit's co-founder and original CEO told Re/Code. He has taken over as interim CEO.

He also told the publication that the company has committed two things publicly, i.e. “creating a new content policy” and “improving tools for moderation.” Huffman also confirmed that George Pang, who was managing the team for over a year prior to Blount will take over the position on an interim basis.

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