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.)

What is described in the article isn't sexism - it's fear. Fear of being labeled as a sexist.

Its treating people different based on gender. It depends very much on semantics whether you call that sexism. It is certainly not the form of sexism that people these days are most worried about.

That would be discrimination based on sex, but no it would not be sexist in this case. Now if, for example, he treated people based on gender because he felt women belong in the kitchen, then that would be both sexist and discriminatory.

The words sexism/racism often get confused with discrimination.

> The words sexism/racism often get confused with discrimination.

Oxford definition of “sexism” via Google:

> prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex

The definition of sexism seems to include discrimination. What definition are you using?

The problem is how politically charged the word 'sexist' is. I'm aware that the boring unemotional dictionary definition is treating someone differently on the basis of gender, but in reality if a guy is hanging out in a women's toilet its not generally seen as sexist/sexism to ask him to leave (even though this is discrimination on the basis of sex).

So labelling anything where two genders are treated differently as 'sexism' or 'sexist' I don't think actually matches the modern usage of the word. I think the difference is it's usually used in a negative connotation and the type of discrimination is seen as non-acceptable - for instance most people wouldn't call a girl-band or boy-band sexist because they select their members based on gender, while most would call an employer sexist if they had a generic business and tried to segregate their teams into single-gender teams. Most people still don't have a problem with boy bands (i.e. a male-only-team in a music workplace), thus not sexist, but do have a problem with male-only-teams in other workplaces, thus sexist.

> if a guy is hanging out in a women's toilet its not generally seen as sexist/sexism to ask him to leave (even though this is discrimination on the basis of sex)

Enforcing a rule isn’t discrimination. The rule itself may or may not be discrimination.

> Most people still don't have a problem with boy bands (i.e. a male-only-team in a music workplace), thus not sexist, but do have a problem with male-only-teams in other workplaces, thus sexist.

They get the label “boy band” after they form. If they were a mixed gender group (like a workplace) and kicked out a talented female musician because they wanted to be male-only, that would be sexist.