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Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

femfosec.com

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Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#451

Post by arp242 »

wontendwell wrote: post #324
hobs wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your methods and conclusions make no sense - associating with women doesn't get you canceled, Kevin Spacey didn't molest any women as far as I know. Smugness makes no sense when what it appears is you have some deep rooted psychological issues that need addressing.

I am going to be honest and admit I have a problem with women also and would much prefer to work only with other men. In addition, I lament that it is iillegal for men to have their own organizations of any kind. It is not legal for men to have their own clubs or organizations in the Western world. It is illegal for men, and particularly white men, to self select and self organize. This is a factual statement. I do w…

> In addition, I lament that it is iillegal for men to have their own organizations of any kind. It is not legal for men to have their own clubs or organizations in the Western world. It is illegal for men, and particularly white men, to self select and self organize. This is a factual statement.

I don't think it's "illegal"; the problem is that these kind of organisations tend to veer towards the toxic and hateful.

Incels are an excellent example of this; the entire concept was started by a woman struggling with her own involuntary celibacy and started a support forum. Good initiative. But over time things have become ... well, rather different.

A lot of the so-called "men's rights" groups have some legitimate grievances, and I have seen more than a few outspoken feminists underscore this. But having legitimate grievances doesn't excuse their terrible behaviour and attitude.

There are some decent groups for this; /r/MensLib on Reddit is pretty good. But the average is not exactly great.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#452

Post by ufmace »

igorkraw wrote: post #350
toyg wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Yet another man who thinks all women are hysteric. What next, are you going to ask me if it’s my ‘period’?” Once one moves from a position of effective prejudice (“he will criticise me because I’m a woman”), any critical statement can be read from that perspective. It’s a bit like with conspiracy theories, where every debunking attempt can be turned into “ of course THEY would say that!”.

You are inventing a hypothetical straw-man. Until you can point to conversation where someone said something fact based like I gave as an example and people accept your twisting and start a twitter mob of any impact, this remains a hypothetical victimization.

There's nothing hypothetical or straw-man about his comment. If you surf around english-language forums where the new breed of feminist hangs out, you'll see dozens of posts pretty much exactly like that, all highly liked/upvoted and with huge numbers of responses agreeing and amplifying. Any posts with the message of "hold on, maybe it's not just sexism and he actually has a point" will be downvoted and attract hateful responses: "you sound like just another one of those sexists!".

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#453

Post by spoonjim »

remarkEon wrote: post #377
skjfdoslifjeifj wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my main concerns is that almost all legitimate discussion is now happening in private invite only communities because people are too risk averse to continue to chat on public sites that will be indexed forever in a culture where they can be cancelled for even a slightly uncouth opinion. Almost all of my consumption and contribution on the Internet is now in private communities that are quite strict about invit…

Not saying I do this, necessarily, but friends of mine who are active in policy circles write for various publications under pseudonyms now for this reason. The development of the idea happens in private group chats, where everyone is using their IRL name, but the publication happens under a pen name. I really don't know if this is a positive change for how policy gets made, but it is happening actively right now.

Can you link to some examples of policy papers written under pseudonyms?

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#454

Post by TameAntelope »

What do people think of the idea that this is a cost worth paying? The transaction is, "sometimes less candor" for, "oftentimes less discrimination".

I think it's true and fair to say that caring more about how people are perceiving you results in drawbacks, and the world we live in where people do watch how their actions effect others isn't a perfect, problem-free world.

It makes intuitive sense to me that sometimes, when we work to raise people up, we do so at some cost to the people who are already at the top. This could be an example of that, I think.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#455

Post by flumpcakes »

maxerickson wrote: post #207

The structural sexism in this story is arguably the investor choosing to spare himself the minor risk to reputation, the assumption that the CEO isn't likely enough to listen to the advice fairly for it to be worth giving. (it's not at all a given that the situation would blow up in his face…)

> (it's not at all a given that the situation would blow up in his face…)

The article was talking about risk. Risk isn't binary, if it was then there wouldn't be a risk...

> minor risk to reputation

I think the article, and at least from some candid comments in this thread, indicate that people perceive this risk as much more than minor. Almost as if not being labeled a racist or sexist or homophobic (founded or not) is worth a few $m lost from the inaction taken to avoid that labeling.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#456

Post by throwaway19937 »

simonbarker87 wrote: post #82

> I’m not going to suggest a solution to the problem of men clamming up. I find this a little frustrating, they’ve noticed a pattern of behaviour that concerns them in an area they are clearly invested in - yet they have no thoughts or suggestions on how to address this? Is it possible they are not offering such thoughts because of the same issue they have highlighted in the article?

Kim Elsesser's book Sex and the Office: Women, Men, and the Sex Partition That's Dividing the Workplace has some concrete advice on this topic.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#457

Post by lightgreen »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #430

The other day, I was in a Zoom meeting with another man and a woman. The call had too much latency, and the conversation was a tad heated, so we were all interrupting each other to some extent—but I noticed halfway through that I was interrupting the woman more, and she was speaking the least. Just like in all the research. While I certainly didn't go silent for the rest of the meeting, I made a concerted effort to l…

It is not necessarily your bias against women. It is equally possible that the woman is not self-confident enough to interrupt you more often.

Recently I had a zoom meeting with two women. One of them was a bit shy and quiet, and the other one constantly interrupted me and the other woman. There was nothing gender-specific in that encounter.

Similarly, in other meetings there are often some men who stay quiet (but obvs nobody cares about them).

Possibly we should let shy people talk more. Regardless of whether they are women, men, black, gay or whatever.

Or maybe not. Maybe you need to be self-confident and a bit bold to lead, because if you don't, you won't be a good leader anyways even if you were given time to speak regardless of your sex. I don't know.

Don't look for sexism in every encounter.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#458

Post by franga2000 »

oneplane wrote: post #386
stcredzero wrote: post #332

Knowledge of history has gone down, year over year. Students are more likely to get a propagandized and highly skewed caricature of history that leaves out certain "inconvenient truths." This is also an overcorrection.

Which students, and where? I don't see that happening locally, but perhaps it's different where you are?

Small sample, since I come from a country of only 2M people, but there's a growing number of people, including historians and history teachers, that are trying to rewrite WW2 history by framing the Nazi-collaborating groups as the good guys, fighting for our country to rid us of the communist evil that was the liberation front - and everyone is just eating it up. The ordinary people risking their lives to fight literal Nazis are now depicted as the "aggressors" and the people that marched on our own cities under Hitler's flag are the good guys?? Why, because the mere idea of communists doing something good is so dangerous to neoliberalist society that we'd rather call literal Nazis the good guys??? But if you say "communism bad, they fought communists => they were the good guys" and conveniently fail to mention the whole Nazi-collaborating thing, no student will question it because they really don't care anyways.

// Sorry, this turned into a bit of a rant, but yes, there's definitely a lack of understanding of history in schools these days and certainly some pretty powerful propaganda

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#459

Post by etempleton »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #188
nullsense wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more like reverse sexism here. I totally get the behaviour here. You simply don't want to be on the receiving end of potential backlash when you're just trying to help someone. The calculus being you feel as if you might make a genuine remark only to receive a response interpreting said remark as the product of sexism e.g "out of persons A and B, I think B should run the company" where A is a woman and B is a ma…

One example I overheard was a female engineer talking to another female non-engineer outside their workplace just about their experiences in their jobs. I heard the female engineer remark something along the lines of "the Architect often shoots down my ideas because I'm female". I sat thinking to myself... That's interesting because the architect shoots down my ideas too (different workplace, so I don't _know_ her si…

A difficulty of being a minority of any stripe must be the not knowing.

Was the architect dismissive of my ideas because I am a woman? Because he shoots down everyone’s ideas? Because he has a specific problem with me? Because my ideas are bad?

One of the greatest challenges I had to overcome in my career was not reading too much into the actions of others. When you do you can easily be offended by everything.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#460

Post by random5634 »

Female founder friend (non tech space) was in a female focused incubator / competition. She got only one set of somewhat critical feedback - ie, lacks experience in X and Y which are key in product space Z.

She posted a comment on her social media focusing on this feedback as "criticism" that came from a sexist guy "of course". It was pretty easy to draw the line to the three panelists, one of whom was a guy. Ouch.

In a previous life, I'd worked in a awesome (female led!) product company. While I had no experience prior to this, I quickly realized that the product itself and its quality etc was almost irrelevant to success, the X and Y mentioned by the male panelist was unfortunately everything, which you'd only know if you were in the space itself. The female led company I worked for was bought out by a (male led) competitor, who then using much strong x and y skills - cleaned up. Company I worked for got basically nothing.

Fast forward - my friends business not doing so great, she asks me for feedback. I said nothing other than enthusiasm. Partly because I was really enthusiastic - she'd put her heart into this project. But her comment on social was in my mind - I had no desire to be next sexist guy "shooting down" an idea

She's out of the business I think mostly. Anyways, this parallels the take of the article.

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