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Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

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Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#911
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…

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Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#912

I have worked with couple female developers and I had many interesting discussions on the whole problem of being woman developer. Here some random thoughts / observations: Hiring women because "we need at least one woman on the team because of the quota". Would you like to know you have been hired because the team is forced to have a women and everybody knows it? Same company. I have received an email that you can "g…

> Hiring women because "we need at least one woman on the team because of the quota". Would you like to know you have been hired because the team is forced to have a women and everybody knows it?

Interestingly this. We are in the process of hiring a woman because of the quota. Well, we are trying because for every 20 male applicants we probably don't even get 1 female. And we are a team of 7 males. Odds are we have a female employee in a team of 8 are less likely than norm considering the applicants. But here we are.

Like it is insane, we had a female applicant which was rejected in the home assignment process. My manager told me that he felt that he needed to ask the reviewer a second time that if he is sure. Because we desperately need a token female.

And there are times that I wonder if I am part of the quota because I am an expat in this country and I come from a less developed country. I am confident in my skills that I am a good fit even if my nationality helped me at the beginning even if I got here because I am a token but I can see that it would be demotivating if I was unsure

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#913
post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The men are assuming based on the female founder’s gender _alone_ that she might accuse him of sexism. Not necessarily. In a social situation, you may be more afraid of what other people will think than of what that one person will think. If that one person misreads you and hates you, it's not some big career-ending problem. It only becomes a big career-ending problem when a whole lot of other people agree that you d…

> It only becomes a big career-ending problem when a whole lot of other people agree

generally agree but have seen plenty cases on social media where the barrier to that agreement was incredibly low. I've even watched myself at times backing the wrong side -out of solidarity[1]- simply because I followed that person already for years and agreed to most of their other opinions.

[1] and what monster would not "always believe the victim"? As a proud father of a gorgeous and smart daughter I have an almost automatic response to see women's rights as something I need to protect. I'd always be harsher on my won sex when it comes to blame or "whodunit" (I'm aware of it so I'm able to counter it but no doubt that this pattern is always present like some muscle memory)

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#914
I am glad that our company started using initials during our code reviews. We have an assignment for the applicants and our HR sends us (developers) the promising applicants but we only know their initials. So we are not biased against females or other nationalities.

Not because it will help us at reducing the bias, I am glad because no one will think of me as a sexist/racist when I give a negative feedback on an assignment review.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#915

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your conclusion is as subjective as his is. There is no real objective criteria by which the "net negative" could be measured. Even history will not be objective, because it will be written by those in power. However I'm of the same mind as him, that this has been more negative than positive for three reasons:

1) This was a precedent for public shaming without evidence or due process 2) This generally changed the working dynamic between male and female to something extremely formal and sometimes borderline hostile 3) It was a bandwagon for actresses(and eventually other careers) to make money because of 1)

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#916
There is an interaction with a female coworker that still haunts me to this day.

I joined a company in a different country and that coworker slacked me and said her welcomes in my mother tongue and asked me to speak in that. Apparently one of her parents was from my country and she lived there during her childhood and she was missing it

After carefully planning my reply for 15 minutes, my reply was something like: "Hi, thanks for the welcome! We can have a tea and chat if you ever visit to our floor". Immediately I thought that could be interpreted as me hitting her but I offered the tea conversation because tea is a big part of our culture and we used to do that all the time back at home with our coworkers.

But yea, it kinda felt like I am hitting on her and I was a bit worried that I introducing myself in such a bad way. iirc she replied something like "sure, thanks :)" and that smiley still haunts me. Nothing happened after that, no tea for us either.

So yeah, if you are a sperg like me with 0 social skills, it is even more worrying interacting with opposite sex.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#917

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 o…

> made some passing comment about the CSS quality not being "ideal" or something of the sort Not saying you weren't the subject of over-reaction, or not, but I think this is an example of sub-par feedback. It would be better to point out the issues in concrete terms, and say this is something that should be addressed, and why. And if you can't do that, you should ruminate on it until you can reify whether it is wrong…

It has only been in recent years that I have even been able to articulate what the issues are with the code of some junior developers. I was fortunate to find "Semantic Compression" by Casey Muratori and now I have something I can point to and language to use. Before that, junior devs may have perceived the feedback as either an undue imposition of my taste, intimidation or (if any of them had ever been a woman) toxic masculinity.

Should we refrain from giving feedback before we have fully articulated the principles by which we would like our code to be written? What about the abundance of tacit knowledge that we can only hope others to learn by osmosis?

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#918

Serious question. Where are the highly capable females that are being locked out of opporunity because of sex? All of the highly capable women I know seem to be exceling.

I've been asking this for years now and constantly found my comments buried and shut down on here and other platforms like reddit. I have made comments literally just asking for evidence and had them buried. As yet, I have not seen a single shred of evidence that there are highly capable females locked out due to sex.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#919

A female founder acquaintance of mine (who's quite smart and capable) went on a Twitter screed a couple weeks ago. As it turns out, someone else had copied her idea, and her startup now had a competitor. The competitor was also able to raise a solid amount of money despite her being first to market and her having more relevant knowledge of the problem space (by her own estimation). So, this scenario isn't exactly unc…

We review social media for management level hires. One of the big red flags is exactly this - accusing people/companies/organizations of sexism/racism/xenophobia/illegal activity/etc without providing any material evidence.

This applies to both men and women, from any background. Even forgetting the potential for these accusations to be levied on us, it's simply a legal liability to have someone on the team that makes public accusations on social media without evidence.

The last thing anyone wants is a lawsuit magnet on the team. Lawsuits are extremely expensive, even when you win.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

#920
I hate to say it, but this kind of behavior makes sense. It's more difficult to criticize female leaders right now for a lot of reasons. The author makes good points, and there is a disparity when it comes to criticism because men have to worry about how it might be viewed. Women are people too, and most people make terrible leaders and terrible leaders will retaliate however they can. A guy who was a Director at my current company got about half a dozen people fired because they disagreed with him on a topic he was ultimately wrong about. He was able to do this because he presented himself as a visionary that would prove them all wrong. He was subsequently fired after he was shown to lack perspective and expertise in the technical field his "vision" required, but those other people still lost their jobs well before that point.

Now, imagine an equally bad female leader that is also presented as a visionary. Maybe she just gets them fired by complaining to the CTO like happened at my company, or maybe she also posts the details online and ruins their reputations. She would potentially make them unemployable, while still being ultimately wrong and a bad leader.

Now, on top of that consider that while having this opinion, I still am constantly advocating for my female colleagues because on top of all that, the tech field just doesn't have many female members. The odds of a woman being a good leader is about the same as for a male in the tech field, but there's still 10 times more men. To be clear, do to pressure and a human need for validation I would say the average female dev is better than the average male by a bit because they push themselves a little harder, but good leadership is not something that develops by working harder.

All of this makes everything to do with this topic extremely difficult to deal with. I want to provide the same level of criticism to everybody, but if I don't know you well enough I can't be sure my name won't get dragged through the mud on social media. It might not even be the woman in question who does it, and the higher the stakes for the woman, the more likely I am to get called out by a coworker who's just trying to do the right thing. The end result is still that by criticizing a female leader I risk not only my job, but my entire career and social standing. That simply isn't the case when I criticize the male version of the terrible boss, and case in point I did so in the example I provided, I just wasn't high enough up the chain for him to bother reacting to.

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