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.)

Basically the me too movement and the way in which men cannot defend themselves from sexual accusations back fired. Very predictable that this happened, there’s no easy solution.

It's perhaps a bit much to conclude from some anecdotes in this thread that the me too movement backfired (i.e., was a net negative for women in the workplace) as a whole.

Your conclusion is as subjective as his is. There is no real objective criteria by which the "net negative" could be measured. Even history will not be objective, because it will be written by those in power. However I'm of the same mind as him, that this has been more negative than positive for three reasons:

1) This was a precedent for public shaming without evidence or due process 2) This generally changed the working dynamic between male and female to something extremely formal and sometimes borderline hostile 3) It was a bandwagon for actresses(and eventually other careers) to make money because of 1)

You misread. I did not make any conclusions in my post.

I do lean towards the opposite opinion. But I'm in no position to judge definitively whether the net effect has been positive or negative so far, I'd need to interview a sizeable and representative sample of women for that.

Responding to your points:

1) What's missing from this argument is how we get to this point. IMO, the reason public shaming was used by the movement as a way to achieve justice, is because from their point of view, there was no other way to achieve justice. It's a classic example of "taking matters into their own hands" because the system failed them. Public shaming isn't the end goal, it should be a wake-up call to restore faith in the system.

2) I don't feel like anything meaningful changed in how I interact with female coworkers since metoo. But I only have my own experience to go on, so I won't make any big claims here.

3) Even if this is true (citation needed), it seems irrelevant.