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Comment by thanatropism | Hacker News Reader

Legitimate question to people involved in funding, incubators, etc. Does this hurt the perception of women founders/CEOs in the margin (where a VC or maybe YCombinator has to pick five companies out of ten where eight look pretty good)?

I mean, I've seen a lot of criticism in the non-stupid parts of the internet about Marissa Mayer, for example -- and she arrived really late to the party.

Now, I know that rushing to conclusions about "women entrepreneurs" from three, five, fifteen, sixty-seven cases is really sexist because we don't rush to say men are terrible entrepreneus because of countless projects gone awry. I mean, I can only imagine the vitriol Nick Denton would have gone through were he a woman.

But people are sexist. People are racists -- if instead of female CEOs we were talking Sri Lankan CEOs, we'd have long arrived at a cliché conclusion, I think. Am I too pessimistic?

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There are already plenty of VCs and other influencers who, knowingly or not and intentionally or not, demonstrate sexist behaviors and attitudes. You see it over and over and over.

If you're already prone to some degree of sexism, observing Theranos, Yahoo, and maybe uBeam recently might result in confirmation bias kicking in.

If you try to be rational and as self-aware as you can though, you realize these are just a handful of examples with coincident timing and there are many, many, many times as many female CEOs who are doing just fine. You also recall all the male CEOs who have been fuckups or caused tremendous damage, not only in startupland but elsewhere like Wall St, and realize that sex is probably not a significant contributor to outcome. Mindset and ethics are among the far more likely indicators.

So, will this affect things on the margin? Maybe... with people predisposed to look for negative signals about fitness of women as CEOs. Not for anyone trying to be as objective as possible.

"and realize that sex is probably not a significant contributor to outcome"

It is sort of a doubled edged sword, if race and gender have no significant effect on outcome, then in a way that could be used as a justification for blocking those people from said positions. On the other hand, if it's the opposite then is purely superficial.

A partial answer is that it will hurt in the following way. The main reason Theranos got so big, both as a company and (especially) as a story, was that Holmes was presented as the female Steve Jobs. In future investors might ask themselves "am I falling for another Elizabeth Holmes? I recall reading that Paul Graham once noted that he was vulnerable to giving extra credit to guys who looked and dressed like Mark Zuckerberg.Prejudice as a cognitive bias works both ways and if you are conscious of it, you might overcorrect

There's a term for Marissa Mayer's situation: "Glass cliff"

I don't have capital, so my opinion is distanced from the point of friction. However, that said, no, I don't think they will affect other female entrepreneurs negatively.

Moreover, Mayer, Holmes, etc. will see more opportunities in the future. Once people are on this track it's seldom they fall off completely. Someone will see potential in them.

Whether you think they executed well or not, this time round, they have invaluable experience for the next company.

>Once people are on this track it's seldom they fall off completely.

Yup, and it applies to both genders. I have seen idiots running their companies into the ground only to re-surface a few years later at another company, as CEOs, because: experience.

"Once a CEO, always a CEO".

> if instead of female CEOs we were talking Sri Lankan CEOs, we'd have long arrived at a cliché conclusion

I wasn't able to follow this sentence. What is the cliché with Sri Lankan CEOs? I'm not even sure I know of any. I had to look up Sri Lanka to find out that it is not part of India because initially I assumed you were trying to say something about the Indian CEOs we see in the valley.

I think the idea is that our (American) culture doesn't have an 'immune system' that responds defensively and automatically to criticisms of Sri Lankan professionals in the way that is extended to some women today

I'm assuming it was a hypothetical. If several highly publicized Sri Lankan CEOs failed miserably - would people come to a conclusion about Sri Lankan CEO's being worse, and be less likely to support them in the future? The OP thinks people would take the pattern of Sri Lankan CEO's and extrapolate. Replace "Sri Lankan" with "Female" - and maybe this pattern will apply to future Women CEOs as well.

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