I think it's difficult to argue that sexism is a red herring when someone resigns in the wake of a petition that leads off by criticizing them for taking a sexual harassment case to court. It's also difficult to argue that sexism isn't a factor in a resignation preceded by many hundreds of misogynist rants.
So, your responses to my challenge. Thank you! I think the first one is valid, and that reasonable people can disagree; the second one, less so.
Who is Pao a hero to? Not so much me. I think it's fair to argue that she's less a hero than "someone with a cheering section". Is she fighting for gender equality? That depends on the semantics you adopt. Reasonable people will argue that taking a sexual harassment case to court is "fighting for gender equality". Pao's reasonable detractors will say that she's fighting for her own financial interests.
Did Pao resign abruptly? Categorically yes, so much so that I'm a little irritated at Altman and Ohanian to see how it was managed. In an orderly succession, the CEO announces that they're leaving at, say, the end of the month. That didn't happen here. Not only that, but this CEO resigned amidst loud, newsworthy clamor for her ouster. Reddit's choreography leaves open the question of whether Reddit mobs can oust people at Reddit --- certainly, the mob thinks it can! There's no practical reason Pao couldn't have been quietly replaced by Huffman, who could have joined the board, and then a few weeks from now announce her resignation at the end of, I don't know, September. Operationally, Huffman would be doing the same thing he's doing now, but the optics would be clearer.
They didn't do that because Pao resigned abruptly. Not only did she resign abruptly, but both she and the board noted in their announcement that that Reddit mob was a destructive factor in the resignation.
Pao would not have resigned had the last few months of drama --- most of which does not appear to have been her making, and before you settle on "the buck stops with the CEO" please note that in this weird company, the CEO's boss had an operational role, and was himself responsible for the most dramatic misstep the company made. She probably did leave because she genuinely didn't feel she was the right person at this point to grow Reddit's userbase. But that judgement was almost certainly based in part on the fact that anything Reddit did with her name attached would be trolled and harassed by the redpill "chairmin pow" mob.