Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

As a woman, I adopted this solution about a year ago. I will literally tell new teammates, "Look, I'm new to this career, I have a TON to learn, and I would love to be critiqued and given advice on how I can improve. I operate under a good-faith policy, so I will always assume you're being helpful and not condescending, unless you're overwhelmingly insulting (ie: telling me women aren't made for leadership roles.)"

I do not exaggerate when I say that the amount of meaningful advice I've been given since I adopted this technique has increased 5x.

Another perk--due to my vocal policy on this, I had an autistic colleague tell me that I'm the only woman he feels comfortable working with. He struggles to read social situations, and he frets that women will interpret his bluntness as him being dismissive or "mansplaining." It made me very sad to think he's missing out on good relationships with so many talented women in our office, just because of this environment of fear. But he's a wonderful friend and colleague, and I am so happy to have his advice and support.

My problem with this whole situation is that I'm not sure the mob is angry because of the discrimination problem as opposed to pretending to be angry and virtue-signaling to take advantage of the situation. I'd bet that for every person legitimately angry about the situation and has valuable input, there will be dozens who simply exploit the situation for their own benefit. This isn't limited to people even - companies do this too.

The mob mentality itself supports this theory; a genuine effort to solve discrimination would involve respectful communication in an attempt to understand the problem, iron out any misunderstandings and change minds; but this is not what we see - instead we have witch-hunts, partly because the mere appearance of being human towards the "enemy" would cause the rest of the mob to turn on you, but maybe also because there isn't much willingness to actually solve the problem, or maybe even because there wasn't actually a problem if you drill down into the details?

This reminds me of Daryl Davis, a black man who attended KKK rallies in an effort to understand their racist opinions and change their minds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis - that is a genuine effort to solve a problem, which unfortunately wouldn't be possible today because you'd be attacked by the mob for attempting something like this.

> Perhaps, but that all goes away if discrimination is eliminated from our culture.

I'm not sure this will go away; if certain people (or even entire industries) benefit from outrage they will happily find something else to be outraged about.

> We’ve found ways to combat pandemics in ways our ancestors thought impossible. We’ve found ways to travel to the moon. We’ve found ways to communicate instantaneously across the world. Yet imagining such a casual solution to social issues seems to be naïvely optimistic at best, delusional at worst.

The difference is that there is a major upside for solving these problems and little to no downside. I'm not sure whether mob/outrage/SJW culture will ever disappear instead of just digging even deeper for things to be offended about especially when money or virtue is at stake.

This meshes with an experience I had a few years into my career which I'll never forget and had definitely influenced and will continue to influence my future interactions with women in tech.

I, cis white guy in the bay, was hired as a consultant to help build out a product and was pair programming with a woman founder & new engineer and made some passing comment about the CSS quality not being "ideal" or something of the sort. This was later brought up as something that they interpreted as some kind of sexism which completely caught me off guard and put me in a very awkward position of having to respond to that and explain that it was just poorly phrased, not sexism.

In the grand scheme this was very minor situation, e.g. no managers, HR, or social media involved, just between a few people on the project, but it's something I'll never forget and had colored how I interact with women going forward.

Basically I just want to avoid that ever happening again because if you're on the "No I'm not sexist" side of the argument, you've basically already lost in how society engages these days.

No matter how well you believe you have expressed yourself, it is always possible for someone to take your words the wrong way (not the way you intended them to be taken). You can, and should, take the time to craft what you say so that it best (given constraints) represents what you want the person to understand, but that is not always enough. Sometimes, people hear what they expect to hear, not what you say.

Sadly, people in general can't take feedback.