Truly inspirational read. Keep up Tracy.
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Reflections on Being a Female Founder
161–170 of 311 posts
Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder
#162Disclaimer: I don't make the rules, and the rules are probably unsubstantiated.
There's no shame in going to toilet, it's just not in to do it in plain view.
It's not the "feeding your child" bit that raises eyebrows, it's "naking your boobs".
Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked for a woman cofounder. It's incredible the things some VCs told her, including trying to get the other founder to drop her from the deal explicitly because of her gender. Make no mistake about it, the ugly goes way deeper than just a bad comment here or there. Thankfully the trend is toward better.
Is the trend towards better? I used to think so but the stories I heard in my time in Google was really, really depressing. The problem is that getting worse can be a self-reinforcing thing. Once a few women get badly treated and leaves the gender imbalance gets worse and the bad behavior gets normalized.
Real change is slow, one of the biggest differences is you used to simply not hear about similar things.
Back during the Bush jr administration my mother’s PHD advisor was getting threading/demeaning phone calls late at night from senior members of the administration over some research she had published. What struck me is the story was shared because the researcher thought it was funny rather than actually intimidating. For context some aspect of no child left behind was being pushed because it would line specific people’s pockets and rather than simply be discreet about they where pushing a narrative.
Presumably they approached things like this because they thought it would work without blowing up in their faces. Now days I think the risk vs reward on such things has changed slightly. In another 20 years things will be likely be mostly the same but probably with minor improvements.
Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder
#164I wish there were a clear bad guy here, but most of the hardship seems to have been caused by more diffuse social pressures. What could we have done as an industry to improve the author's experience? Maybe just having more female founders around in general (by removing any barriers) would make some of these circumstances more commonplace.
Many times in the article she perceive male founders as stoic machines that regardless of health or mental state would go to work and operate as if nothing is wrong, and then goes to copy that. That is a stereotype that is hurting both men and women, and removing that would resolve a lot of the hardship.
That approach gets you to do most you can, weeding out those unwilling in a Darwinian matter.
Successful CEOs are outside 6 sigma freaks in a certain respect.
Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder
#165Reflections on being a trans founder: Nobody cares. Prepare to be misgendered a fair amount. Know that you will have to go to bat for your employees which may limit your options when it comes to going to bat for yourself. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
Sounds brutal. Are you still running your company? Sincerely, good luck.
I didn't understand what you meant by going to bat for your employees - bat against whom?
Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder
#166I have no idea what this company does but her account of it is genuine, honest and makes me appreciate the true difficulty of being a female leader.
It's a bit unfortunate there isn't a government support for women in power to take with huge risks while bearing children. It's unclear as an outsider what a free market could do to help here and that's sad.
Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder
#167This was a good read and I thank Tracy for writing it. However, I do have some remarks about the comments I am reading here, so I am writing a top level post so as to not single out a specific comment. It doesn't become ok to stereotype just because the stereotypes are saying nice things about the right demographics. I read a comment here talking about women going into management roles because of higher 'EQ', and bei…
> I read a comment here talking about women going into management roles because of higher 'EQ', and being better than men at noticing social and monetary rewards, and what not.
There was more than one comment, so you might be right about some of them. But the ones I read had an extra level of indirection: it wasn't the authors of the comments who had the "women have higher EQ" idea but the people they were talking about and who are pressuring women to move into management. So it is not "X is true" but "Y thinks X is true and so is doing Z" that is being presented as a fact.
Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I have. And he's right. Once you open the door, you're looking for a reason to not buy it. For example, you don't hire a home inspector if you don't want to buy the property.
That's not how the quote is said above. The real estate agent says the client has decided on the house before they step foot in it. I have bought and sold many a house and I've never made a decision that way. Looking for insight / looking for reasons, ok, I agree with you. But clients who make decisions without stepping foot in a house? That's crazy talk.
> That's not how the quote is said above.
That's not how English works. I did not say "the client has always decided". Nobody expects statements are absolute when talking about the behaviors of people. The non-literal meanings of English is why each profession has its own specialized jargon (like lawyer legalese, military jargon, and aviation terms).
Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder
#169> On some days, I would park my car on a sleepy street in Palo Alto and pump milk with a silicone hand pump in front of someone’s nice house, reading profiles of the investors in my next meeting from my iPhone. Occasionally someone would drive up, or a jogger would run by, and I would feel completely humiliated. This is just a small bit of everything Tracy wrote. But I would love to see this stigma changed. There sho…
Taking a step back from her story, I find it so weird that we stigmatise some of the most universal human experiences.
Essentially every person will piss burp fart and poop. And almost every person has one of two genitals. (EDIT and our biological parents will have one of each). And almost every mother will feed their baby with their breasts.
And yet we have become so detached from the animal part of our identity and so caught up in some abstract values that we get squeamish seeing and talking about these things.
We have much to learn on this front from our scandi and dutch friends who have chilled the F out.
Re: Reflections on Being a Female Founder
#170Disclaimer: I don't make the rules, and the rules are probably unsubstantiated. There's no shame in going to toilet, it's just not in to do it in plain view. It's not the "feeding your child" bit that raises eyebrows, it's "naking your boobs".
The toilet is a place where we get rid of the dirty things our bodies produce. We do it away from others because it's not sanitary or safe to just do it in the open.
It's weird that an adult can have a meal just about anywhere they please, but when a baby needs to be fed, the expectation is to do it in an isolated area as if it's a disgusting act.