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At the top of Ellen Pao's Twitter feed is a quote from the author Toni Morrison, part of which reads "if you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else."
Pao may no longer hold the same traditionally powerful roles she's held in the past -- either at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, where she lost her high-profile discrimination case against last year, or as interim chief executive of Reddit, where she resigned after widespread criticism.
But she appears to be putting those experiences to work in her next act: a new effort, with seven other women in Silicon Valley, to help empower start-up leaders to improve diversity through sharing ideas and collecting data from tech companies.
The group that is launching Project Include, announced Tuesday and first reported in the New York Times, includes not only Pao -- who is leading the effort, teammates say -- but a group of women who have put a spotlight on diversity problems in Silicon Valley.
They include Erica Baker, an engineer at the messaging app Slack who gained attention when she started a salary spreadsheet while working at Google, as well as Tracy Chou, a Pinterest software engineer who set up a place in 2013 for people to share numbers on female engineers.
Other members...