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.)

I think a lot of what is going on in society right now comes down to people buying into a worldview about victims and villains. When we talk about any ism, most people understand that to be a dynamic where one side of the ism is the oppressor - a villain, and the other side the oppressed - a victim.

And as this article points out, the zeitgeist of the moment is the presumption of guilt, so any accusation of being an *ist comes with tremendous consequences, and people are understandably fearful of that.

What you're observing that this creates an unfortunate vicious cycle: the fear of persecution for an accidental offense leads to disengagement which disadvantages the very people who the disengagement is meant "not to hurt."

This isn't a new observation.

MLK said: "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction ... The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation." [1]

I think this is where the extremes of "wokeism" and "social justice" miss the mark. When the mob is rallied to punish and seek vengeance against those who have done wrong, it can become a witch hunt.

To Dr. King the path to victory over oppression was through forgiveness[2].

"Here then is the Christian weapon against social evil. We are to go out with the spirt of forgiveness, heal the hurts, right the wrongs and change society with forgiveness. Of course we don't think this is practical. This is the solution of the race problem."

In the hypermedia era I honestly don't know if calm, civil discourse is possible. It certainly isn't profitable compared to the level of engagement driven by outrage.

But I think if we wanted to take the next major step forward it would be wise to look back at how much progress happened during the Civil Rights era, and specifically to understand how and why the progress was made. Can we imagine applying Dr. King's words today, to seek to understand each other, to identify wrongs done intentionally or unintentionally, and then to forgive each other for past mistakes so we can do better going forward?

[1]: https://mlk.wsu.edu/about-dr-king/famous-quotes/ [2]: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/mea...