Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

I'm really glad to see this here. I don't have a better word readily available than sexism for trying to talk about patterns like this but when I use the word sexism, I think people think I mean "Men are intentionally exclusionary assholes just to be assholes because they simply hate women." and that's never what I'm trying to say.

I find my gender is a barrier to getting traction and my experience is that it's due to patterns of this sort and not because most men intentionally want me to fail. But the cumulative effect of most men erring on the side of protecting themselves and not wanting to take risks to engage with me meaningfully really adds up over time and I think that tremendously holds women back generally.

I think gendered patterns of social engagement also contributed to the Theranos debacle. I've said that before and I feel like it tends to get misunderstood as well. (Though in the case of Theranos it runs a lot deeper in that she was actually sleeping with an investor.)

Genuine question, if you were a man in that situation, what would you do?

You give the honest feedback.

We won’t progress as a society by being afraid.

What's good for society might not be good for the individual.

True, but a broken society isn’t good for the individual either.

But a broken society might maybe affect you somewhat vaguely in decades, but putting your neck out now can demolish your career today.

Yes, it’s a question we all need to ask ourselves. If you have kids though or plan to live more than a decade or more, the choice is hopefully one of bending towards the greater good for society rather than the individual.

I have kids. Providing for them is number one, becoming a meaningless casualty of culture wars doesn't help their future at all.