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.)

Wasn't Theranos debacle because the tech was never going to work due to it being borderline snake oil and whishful thinking hyped by con(wom)man?

Yes, but it was called a "decacorn" because it was valued at $10 billion dollars and its valuation dropped overnight to zero when it was outed as a fraud.

I posit that it wouldn't have gotten so crazy overvalued if it hadn't been headed by a pretty young woman. But trying to explain that is probably "off topic" and just thinking about trying to explain it makes me tired. I'd rather not.

> crazy overvalued

I didn't pay too close attention to the story. If they had managed to produce the tech they claimed for the price they claimed, would $10 billion be crazy overvalued?

I have no idea. Possibly not.

The issue is this: Would a man have gotten a $10 billion valuation based on hot air and zero results for years and years? Or would someone have called him on his shit a lot earlier?

She was literally sleeping with and living with a much older male investor* while publicly claiming to be celibate in her twenties due to her extreme devotion to her career and business. I always figured that was bullshit and she was probably sleeping with someone and "I'm celibate" was probably a cover story.

And no one went looking for that because of fear of being called sexist, I guess. I hesitated to give that opinion on HN for fear of back lash.

But as a woman with six year of college and yadda, when I meet accomplished men in positions to open doors for me, a lot of them find me attractive and this actively closes doors in my face. I'm not willing to sleep with a man to open doors, not because I have some kind of moral objection to that but because I don't believe it actually works.

It didn't actually work for Elizabeth Holmes. Sleeping with an investor did not, in fact, help her succeed in the world of business. It merely helped her cover up fraud while her problems grew larger until it resulted in both criminal and civil suits and her name is mud. She will never really recover from this debacle.

So I don't think sleeping with men to open doors works. I think sleeping with rich and powerful men would get me sex and maybe would let me be a "kept woman" but it wouldn't get me taken seriously as a business woman and it wouldn't teach me how business is done and it wouldn't have some men giving me meaty, constructive feedback.

* Edit: To be crystal clear here, I mean someone who invested in Theranos, I don't mean "Someone whose job title was investor." This was a clear conflict of interest.

> But as a woman with six year of college and yadda, when I meet accomplished men in positions to open doors for me, a lot of them find me attractive and this actively closes doors in my face. I'm not willing to sleep with a man to open doors, not because I have some kind of moral objection to that but because I don't believe it actually works.

I thought this was interesting. Do you mean "it closes doors because they are only prepared to help you if you sleep with them"? Or "it closes doors because they're scared to help you in case you misinterpret it"?

It closes doors because there is no good way for them to proceed. We essentially have no good answers for how to get involved with a woman both professionally and romantically in some ethical, above board fashion.

So men who are attracted to me are damned if they do, damned if they don't.

And I can't trust their motives. Are they helping me because they think I'm smart and talented and a good fit for a project? Or are they helping me hoping it leads to sex?

In practice, they usually don't make any effort to help me professionally anyway. Once they decide I'm attractive, in their minds the relationship is strictly personal and not professional. Period.

My experience has been men consistently decide early whether this is a platonic/professional relationship or a potential romantic interest. If I'm a potential romantic interest, I'm basically dead to them professionally.

They also tend to only think about how this impacts their career, not mine.

When I had a corporate job, one senior programmer in the IT department asked me for a date. In five years working there, he was the only person I met who knew what GIS was without me having to explain it. (I have a certificate in GIS.)

He interpreted that as "We have things in common and she's hot." He did not wonder if I might be an asset to the IT department. He did not wonder if I wanted a job in the IT department.

I did, in fact, want a job in the IT department. Being asked out by him did nothing to hurt his career. He was doing nothing wrong.

I'm sure he stopped to consider that. I'm sure he stopped to check that asking me out was not a fire-able offense.

He likely did not wonder how it impacted my career at the company. It made it vastly less likely I would ever get a job in his department.

This was true whether I said "yes" or "no." Simply being asked for a date, regardless of how that went personally, made it vastly less likely I would ever get into the IT department.

I left the company a few weeks later. I likely would have left anyway and had been planning to do so for some time, but him asking me for a date was something of a final nail in the coffin, killing all hope that I had a shot at a real future at the company.

I didn't. That simply was a non starter.

So it made it easier to pull the trigger on plans to leave.