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Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

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Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#501

Post by dang »

baby wrote: post #160

There's an extreme right, and there's an extreme left. Right now the whole right is an extreme right, whereas the left is divided between more moderate and cancel culture. Apparently tucker said that the right would go into full fascist mode because of BLM/antifa (lol), I'm wondering if the left is going full woke because of the right going fascist. People are being triggered by the other side, and becoming extremist…

Please do not take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. This is veering off topic, and not in the good way.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26613456.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#502

Post by downandout »

Anyone who is pragmatic and willing to take open and honest advice/criticism from people they respect needs to advertise themselves that way in today’s environment. It is on the entrepreneur to convince the person from whom they are seeking advice that they will not regret giving it. As an alternative, perhaps investors should offer an optional “advice NDA” that would allow them to speak more freely, with less fear of social media scorn.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#503

Post by humanrebar »

throwaway194726 wrote: post #419
jancsika wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm sexist then I could choose to make such a remark only if it happens to be a female colleague. If male then sleep(). Sexism achieved. If you're not from the U.S. you have to understand the background of mendacity that flows through nearly the entire culture. That's a big part of the backdrop for fairly deep levels of distrust, whether it's of a company, one's colleague, the gov't, etc. For example-- I was watch…

Wow, that's a pretty deep, insightful and harsh analysis of your own culture. You've found exactly the words to express something that I noticed in the states as well, but couldn't quite put my finger on. Did you figure this from the outside, so to speak, spending time abroad and immersing in a different culture? I've found that most people sort of start noticing cultural blind spots only then.

The US is a diverse place. The culture described by GP fits the wealthy and management classes well. Working class folks tend to be a lot more forthright, often to their detriment in many circumstances, but there are huge swathes of American culture in which folks speak frankly about basically everything.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#504

Post by awb »

dageshi wrote: post #8
DoreenMichele wrote: post #5

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…

Genuine question, if you were a man in that situation, what would you do?

You give the honest feedback.

We won’t progress as a society by being afraid.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#505

Post by daenz »

There's a dark irony to the idea that the defenses against sexism (standing up and calling people out) are also causing an unintended secondary sexism by discouraging equal treatment out of fear of accusations.

I've held the belief that if a someone can't recognize and clearly identify the differences between criticism based on merits and criticism based on bias, then there is no point attempting to do "what they want," because they don't know how to identify what they want even if they got it.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#506

Post by TameAntelope »

ambicapter wrote: post #473
TameAntelope wrote: post #454

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…

The way I read the article, the majority of the cost is not on those "already at the top". Its on the women founders who are trying to make it.

You don't think "female founders" are approximately at the top of the pyramid of, "women who are building professional careers"?

My point was if there are many women who are benefitting from men being more thoughtful and careful, then it could be worth it to pay the cost of some women not benefitting, especially if they're approximately at the top already.

I don't think demanding a change be strictly positive for everyone is a fair evaluation of the change.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#507

Post by sneak »

igorkraw wrote: post #223

I'm a bit sad about how eager everyone is jumping on the idea that "candid advice" will always be construed as possibly sexist. I'm from Germany and we are famously blunt, so maybe there is a cultural aspect to this, but to me candor != risk of sexism. If your advice is candid, it also shouldn't leave any ambiguity..."I'm unsure about you doing the pitch because the last N times you froze up and you seem nervous agai…

A lot of Americans of any gender would be put off by a lot of very routine and candid professional communications that happen in Germany. I find American English in general to be tending toward the near universal avoidance of direct speech and statements, independent of speaker/listener identity.

Importantly the speaker and listener are not consciously aware of this happening. The net result is that you can say literal/plain thing A and the listener can hear literal/plain thing B.

Speaking to Americans requires a significantly accurate modeling of the listener's mind and expectations to be able to be clearly understood, much much moreso than any other language I have studied or even heard of.

Basically, it is very easy to be totally misunderstood when using plain, literal speech (such as is common in Germany or in Slavic countries).

I've written about it: https://sneak.berlin/20191201/american-communication/

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#508

Post by xbar »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #5

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…

I sad that I cannot respond. It's too dangerous. Good luck.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#509

Post by elefanten »

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…

I strongly agree that there’s a language dimension to this. We don’t have good enough language for lots of passion-invoking social debates. Sexism and racism come top of mind.

For example, an enormous amount of misunderstanding, bad communication and fraught decision making has resulted from the social activist redefinition of “racism” that has gained prominence in the last decade or so. And there are still so many people talking past each other completely obliviously. A richer taxonomy of terms and ideas could help everyone reach understanding.

It seems like the same dynamic as you’re describing in these dialogues on sexism.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#510

Post by julianmarq »

awb wrote: post #499
Thorentis wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s probably both. The men are assuming based on the female founder’s gender _alone_ that she might accuse him of sexism. Regardless of how rational this fear is, they are stereotyping new female founders they’re meeting for the first time based on what an X% of other female founder’s have done in the past. For the men, it’s probably a risk/reward calculation. Keep your head down and be polite and have ~0% chance of…

I don't know the solution to this problem, but I do think that turning it into a Morton's fork ("men are sexist regardless of whether they speak or not") is not it.

Instead of playing semantics by saying that "it is technically sexism" (and I'm not saying I agree with whether it actually is or not), we could choose to at least stop phrasing the situation like that.

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