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Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

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Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#861
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For that particular situation, I'd stay silent. I agree there's a risk, and that this is a problem. Longer term though, I'd make sure we hire female investors into my VC fund. I'd take them along the journey of investing with this startup, and if I felt a female CEO needed to be replaced with a man, I'd discuss this with my investment partners. Any harsh feedback, if given, would be coming from all of us, and a mixed…

Use another woman as a shield? Damned if you do, damned if you don't...

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#862
A skill I think we all need to learn and refine is how we give feedback. There is prep work we can all do before walking into a difficult situation. Thinking about if you are making an observation vs a judgement goes a long way as well as asking the person if they are open to feedback and how they would like to receive it. Maybe the venue is wrong or you are the wrong person to be delivering the feedback at that particular moment (lack context or an existing history of dialog that establishes goodwill). The minute you tip the scales in a way that makes the person feel attacked you have entered into a space that isn’t constructive for either person.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#863
post #499

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 would take zero over non-zero given the consequences.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#864
post #805

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. I…

This reminds me of a previous workplace. An otherwise cool female coleague kept making claims people were misogynistic, at first I thought she was joking or that she did have some claim, because someone made an unintentional mysoginistic joke. Then I left the company, and I talked with an ez coleague who was promoted as a team lead. The guy was into some new age stuff, about helping everyone, and she was slaking/not…

If you take a step back, you could actually look at this as a sign of progress in society. Things are moving enough for sexism to be a concern to a company - even if it's for cynical reasons and it has been weaponised by a dishonest person. Progress is bumpy and people can end up suffering during a transition.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#865
post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its treating people different based on gender. It depends very much on semantics whether you call that sexism. It is certainly not the form of sexism that people these days are most worried about.

That would be discrimination based on sex, but no it would not be sexist in this case. Now if, for example, he treated people based on gender because he felt women belong in the kitchen, then that would be both sexist and discriminatory. The words sexism/racism often get confused with discrimination.

I see this move towards redefining sexism and racism to be the prevalent form of negative sex or race based discrimination, instead of all forms of discrimination.

That's why I stated it is a semantic discussion.

On the one hand, I think this redefining is good. Because when we talk about the problems of racism and sexism, the prevalent form of negative discrimination (so in the west, racism by white people, and sexism by males) are what we tend to mean.

On the other hand, other forms of discrimination also happen, and we need words to describe them. Racism and sexism used to describe that, but by now such describing tends to feel bad. It tends to feel like drawing an equivalence between e.g. a white person not being able to use the N-word being 'just as bad' as the oppression faced by black people in America.

I feel we need separate words for both the systemic (non intentional) oppression of people by sex and gender. And discrimination based on sex and gender in general. Originally racism and sexism used to describe the latter. Slowly we are moving towards having it mean the former, without having new words for the latter. Ideally wish we had just come up with new words for the latter. But that would have lost some of the power that comes from calling someone a racist or a sexist.

In conclusion, semantics matter, and are hard.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#866
post #805

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of a previous workplace. An otherwise cool female coleague kept making claims people were misogynistic, at first I thought she was joking or that she did have some claim, because someone made an unintentional mysoginistic joke. Then I left the company, and I talked with an ez coleague who was promoted as a team lead. The guy was into some new age stuff, about helping everyone, and she was slaking/not…

If you take a step back, you could actually look at this as a sign of progress in society. Things are moving enough for sexism to be a concern to a company - even if it's for cynical reasons and it has been weaponised by a dishonest person. Progress is bumpy and people can end up suffering during a transition.

This could easily be made into hilarious copypasta

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#868
post #529

I'm not a woman but I'm a minority in other dimensions. I've always felt labels such as "female-led", "female-owned", " " do the opposite of what they intend to do. That is, they paint a picture that this minority group is not capable enough and need a lot of hand holding so everyone please bias your decisions towards their success to the detriment of other groups. If that's not enough, currently there are few reperc…

This is the problem. America was supposed to be the land of the free, where anyone from anywhere could have an opportunity didn't matter who they where. Instead we created African-Americans, Italian-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Gay-Americans, Straight-Americans, Native-Americans, etc, and everyone is out for themselves. And everyone is against one another. Female-led, Black-led, Latino-majority, who gives a fuck. Do…

Sadly, it is not as simple as that:

Imagine a society of squirrels and hamsters where squirrels have been oppressing hamsters for centuries. Then, one day, they decide to stop doing that and treat everyone the same.

On average, a young squirrel will come from a family that is vastly richer and better educated than a young hamster. So, if they have to compete "fairly", the hamsters will remain much poorer for centuries more.

This leads to a need to rebalance those two groups, and that rebalance means artificially propping up hamsters. Ideally, we would want to get to a world where the young squirrel and hamster can, on average, compete "fairly"... I have no idea how to achieve that while minimizing the negative side effects.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#869

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…

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.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#870
This doesn't have to be a Founder thing. This also applies to working with women everyday in a team. I have myself faced a lot of unnecessary criticism from emotional disturbed women who just want to lash out for no reason. This is a bad trend which is dirtying up the workspace and the industry. According to the article, I'm in exactly the person who will never give any feedback nor involve in something which will heat up the conversation. I'm happy that this is being talked here.
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