Female Founder Secrets: Men Clamming Up

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A quick reminder to read the article before commenting. HN usually has a better track record of this, but this is a particular issue people are sensitive about so don't draw your conclusions from the title alone.

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.

In a previous life, I'd worked in a awesome (female led!) product company. While I had no experience prior to this, I quickly realized that the product itself and its quality etc was almost irrelevant to success, the X and Y mentioned by the male panelist was unfortunately everything, which you'd only know if you were in the space itself. The female led company I worked for was bought out by a (male led) competitor, who then using much strong x and y skills - cleaned up. Company I worked for got basically nothing.

Fast forward - my friends business not doing so great, she asks me for feedback. I said nothing other than enthusiasm. Partly because I was really enthusiastic - she'd put her heart into this project. But her comment on social was in my mind - I had no desire to be next sexist guy "shooting down" an idea

She's out of the business I think mostly. Anyways, this parallels the take of the article.

My wife, who is a second wave feminist that believes that women should be given the same opportunities, but are not victims, ran across some of the craziness a few years ago.

She was in a tech forum where a woman was complaining about her experience at a company. It amounted to this woman having a perception that she was not being valued as much as a male colleague and was immediately jumping to the conclusion that it was sexism. My wife jumped in and suggested that from the sound of things, it sounded like there may be some other things going on that this person could work on and that it may have nothing to do with sexism etc..

The other people in the forum, including men, crucified my wife for those statements. This along with her daring to suggest in other women in tech forums, groups etc. that not every piece of feedback that is not positive is sexist led her to be banned from several women in tech organizations. Many would not even tell her why, but if they did it was for "being harmful to women" and "suffering from internalized misogyny" among other things.

Given her experience alone, not to mention other things we have all seen in the community none of this is surprising to me. Ironically, one of her concerns when she saw the "micro-agressions" etc. trend take hold, beyond the fact that she felt it was trying to fix one wrong with another, was that it would lead to this...and here we are. [edited for clarity]

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 to patterns of this sort and not because most men intentionally want me to fail. But the cumulative effect of most men erring on the side of protecting themselves and not wanting to take risks to engage with me meaningfully really adds up over time and I think that tremendously holds women back generally.

I think gendered patterns of social engagement also contributed to the Theranos debacle. I've said that before and I feel like it tends to get misunderstood as well. (Though in the case of Theranos it runs a lot deeper in that she was actually sleeping with an investor.)

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.

The payout matrix for "give honest advice / don't give honest advice" has changed, radically. Then some people noticed that, and then their behavior changed to match. It isn't punishing anyone, it's adaptation to a new risk. The "Pence Fence" is a defensive strategem and it didn't arise in a vacuum. It is a costly defense, too, so it being kept up is likely worth the cost to mitigate the risk.

Most of what comes after when discussing the issue is "how to 'fix' this 'problem.'" by encouraging men to speak anyway. But that is the wrong approach, because it relies on people changing their behavior back like hurling themselves on grenades -- you can't count on it. Still high-risk, low-reward. Perhaps even no-reward. Making plans on people (well, men in this instance but it could be anyone) being irrationally drawn to self-sacrifice is not going to pan out, especially if your reputation is destroyed in the mix after. Leaping on grenades typically earns a medal, but here it gets you vilification.

I'm not a woman but I'm a minority in other dimensions.

I've always felt labels such as "female-led", "female-owned", "<insert minority-led>" 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 repercussions for false sexism/racism accusations. I've seen some men lose their career even though the accusations turned out to be a coordinated revenge and were false.

All these together makes dealing with a minority group a lot risky and potentially a headache.

I believe the solution is to keep existing anti discriminatory laws but also ensure false accusations are sufficiently punished/disincentivesed

If you are a woman you can easily counter this behavior by labelling it and saying that you don't have a porcelain skin. Bonuspoints if you laugh about a guy giving you super bad feedback and how this did not bother you.

Putting people at ease around you (especially customers) is a critical entrepreneurial skill.

You can't blame people for being cautious when a lot of people are buying into victim-narratives and convinced to act against their "oppressors".

The other day, I was in a Zoom meeting with another man and a woman. The call had too much latency, and the conversation was a tad heated, so we were all interrupting each other to some extent—but I noticed halfway through that I was interrupting the woman more, and she was speaking the least. Just like in all the research. While I certainly didn't go silent for the rest of the meeting, I made a concerted effort to let the woman talk more, and I'm glad I did, because she had good things to say.

I'm aware that I have the same biases as the rest of society. I do my best to recognize them, and, where applicable, to add a small mental counterweight before making decisions. I don't think this always leads to better outcomes, but I do think it's a net positive. And if investors act on similar frameworks, they've probably doomed some companies and saved others. The future is unknowable, and we'll never know what would have happened.

I wish this investor had acted out of a desire to be a better person, or a more successful VC, rather than from fear of a mob. I'm not a fan of mobs. But none of us are immune to cultural biases, and we should second-guess ourselves accordingly.

I can see this happening with myself (male, for the record). I'm usually someone who gives feedback quite frankly, am more critical of others' (and my own) work than average, etc.

Over recent years I've read so much about women being passed over, cut off, terms like "microaggressions", women getting less talking time in meetings, etc., that's it's made me extremely self conscious.

It's not even that I'm afraid of getting in any actual trouble if I say or do something wrong, it's just that I'm generally already somewhat anxious about how I behave around others and this has made me extremely aware of any time I might be too harsh, not really listen to someone, etc., that I've probably gotten overly sensitive.

>> And the consequences of being accused of sexism by an online mob have now become so extreme that many investors don’t want to risk it anymore.

I'm glad someone said it and I'm glad that that someone is a woman so that there's a chance this message won't immediately get drowned in sexism/male privilege accusations.

This trend isn't going away anytime soon, In fact I think it's just ramping up and is accelerating, especially with the racism narrative the main stream media outlets started to heavily push ~2 years ago and the big identity movement. It will continue until there is consensus, that this climate is bad, for everyone involved. I don't see that happen anytime soon, the cancelations will continue until moral improves.

I'm glad to see this here. I think people in general do not pay much attention to externalities. I wish to see people take a more holistic/deontological view of the fight for equality across all mankind (shit, is that a microaggression? personkind?). I'm not convinced that this over-correction ISN'T net positive either, but there is an ingrained assumption in the zeitgeist that it is a pure fight for a better world for those trodden upon. I don't think the case is so clear cut and I worry about the deafening silence when I look for introspection among those riding this wave of power. People who do not question the righteousness of their cause are frightening, whatever the cause may be. Nothing is righteous, everything is complex, I wish this was something that we could hold tightly in our collective consciousness. Subtlety and nuance is never as easy or attractive as brashness. I guess that's the nature of the beast, who would willingly attack themselves to prevent their own abuse of the power they've newly gained? Only a rare few, I doubt that will change.

"You must beware of shadows."

page 109 of The Little Schemer

It’s worth noting this issue/disutility. But I don’t give it a lot of weight vs. the historical default.

Presumably this doesn’t occur if a female VC is giving that advice to females founders; maybe this will be an additional incentive to actually promote some women to be partners. VC is one of the most male-dominated professions around.

More generally, it’s easy to look at just the costs of a social change, without remembering to weight against the benefits. If this issue is one of the costs, and reduced sexual harassment of female founders is the benefit, then I would ask women who have been in this position how they weigh the two (having not experienced either I wouldn’t presume to know how much the benefit is actually worth to female founders, and since the costs and benefits are both incident on them, it’s not really my place to choose).

But I’d hazard a guess that most women would prefer not to get hit on / harassed as they fundraise, at the expense of sometimes not getting fully candid feedback.

I am so thankful to work in an environment where everyone is just... normal.

We don't have to walk on egg shells when speaking. Men and women can still interact like it was before I started reading about such insanity.

This article is really only the tip of the iceberg. If you're a man in a position of authority, and you're worried about the consequences of you or anybody in your team accidentally stepping on a "diversity" land mine, what's the best way to avoid the problem? Don't hire any women in the first place. You may get some shit from HR for not meeting your diversity targets, but the calculus is increasingly starting to tilt towards this being the lesser evil -- unless you're a talented woman who doesn't get hired because of it, that is.

This goes beyond founders. We're seeing this problem at the level of developers, technical writers, and design folks. In some teams, critical feedback given to our female colleagues would almost always be twisted and escalated as sexism. One time the situation worsened until no one would say much, other developers had to take on extra workload and fix low quality work from other developers. Good engineers started quitting and the team crashed and burned.

In other teams, the folks are super cautious about hiring women because of an increasing number of such incidents. I'm also seeing this other trend where we are willing to hire women from within the company because they're a known quantity, while hiring few or zero women from outside, while accepting men from within and outside the business just based on their capabilities.

The article is right on many levels. I myself rarely share controversial or difficult feedback with female colleagues or acquaintances unless I know them very well, and know they will take it the right way. It's just not worth the professional risk to me.

I don't know if this is the exception, and I work with several female colleagues at various levels of seniority where we are professional and open. Whatever - it's a sad state of affairs.

I think fear is making people in general just clam up.

Anything you say can be taken as offensive and the crowds bay for blood.

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 "get bonus if you refer a friend that gets hired." Then a list of how much you can get depending on position. Then a note -- "if a woman, the reward is tripled".

Promoting women before they got enough experience. Similar to above. You have been put on a fast track for promotion but you haven't had time to get the needed experience. Everybody knows this (and discuss behind your back) but nobody is going to tell it to you. Now you have two problems.

On topic of feedback, people need feedback to improve, but female developers will not get it. All-positive feedback is no feedback at all because you are nowhere closer to knowing what you are doing wrong. I have personally been doing some pretty stupid things (like taking credit for other people work) until somebody told me and I fixed it. I wonder what would I do if nobody dared to tell I am doing anything wrong, or if my salary or position in the team had nothing to do with how well I am actually doing?

Just because guys can't be hitting on girls in the office doesn't mean it isn't there, but now it is more comical.

Just because people aren't supposed to discriminate women doesn't mean it is not there. Male developers seem to be in large part focused on the fact the words are spoken by a female rather than their merit. I have seen concrete examples. It kinda seems it is still true you need to (at least in some cases) work twice as hard to prove anything, but now male employees got better at hiding their discrimination. I am half decided that maybe all the focus on discrimination achieved is push the discrimination underground.

Discussions quieting down when you show up. Or tame behavior when eating lunch. Guys reminding other guys that a woman is present. Supposedly because it is not proper to behave like that (but it is fine when only guys present?) Imagine this happening every time.

In a sense, what she's describing sounds almost old-timey. A return to stiff propriety between men and women in order to avoid the possibility of scandal.

The entirety of everything leading to this point is complex. That said, half the reason for twitterized scandal politics is hyperbole. It's too easy to think in dichotomies and extremes. This stuff can be true without doom being upon us.

I think twitter mob problems will improve in a few years, or move on to other areas.

On a lower profile scale, bullying-related HR processes and associated cultural dynamics can and do "flare up." Many bullying claims. Fear of bullying accusations. Threats. First strikes. etc. It often happens in environments with a lot of bullying. Unpleasant, but it usually passes eventually... I think.

It's interesting that Twitter doesn't get more attention here as a center of activity. Apparently, taking down Harvey Weinstein means you can do no wrong. The problem with Twitter isn't just that they get people fired because people say mean things on the Internet. The problem is also that they incite and organize illegal activities like targeted harassment, threatening phone calls and vandalism, as well as the questionably legal tactic of disrupting businesses' operations so they will comply with a mobs' demands.

When 4chan did this, they were investigated by the FBI. Reddit received a lot of flack for its own vigilante brigades after a mistargeted attempt to "catch the Boston bomber", and had to take action (still incomplete) against raiding.

Facebook and Twitter with their multi-billion market caps have just barely begun to wake up to what their platforms are capable of producing. The effects observed with these investors are not exactly unique to tech finance.

I think something like Wikipedia's protected article policy could help. When something becomes problematic, discussion can be limited to confirmed users, who in turn have more to lose by being banned. This allows Twitter to respond before "censorship" is justified.

Sadly, the current direction in the industry is: “let’s cover our ass”. Which eventually ends up with: less mentoring for women, less promotion, etc.

The problem is that our system and society will not reward companies which do right things (hire, promote, etc.) but it will punish companies for slight irregularities.

Forget “advice” — I will no longer 1) go out, even for coffee during the day, with a female colleague without a third person present, or 2) talk about anything not related to our work or light chitchat like weather or traffic.

In our middle european country there was the initiative to end the discrimination to not employ people based on various markers race, skin color, gender, sex, age, education history (maybe switiching industries in your fourties) ...

If the potential employer rejected your job application with a reason you could fight him in court for discrimination and get compensation even if the employer.

Great intention, but it backfired ... after some companies got sued for legitimate and illegitimate reasons NOBODY answers with a reason why your application was not considered. They maybe hint what was wrong or not ideal.

This reminds me of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes. I have to wonder how she may have received criticism of her ideas if there was a baseline of equality of ideas from men and women.

Basically, to over-simplify severely, instead of taking criticism as a way to improve, she took it as an attack, which I think was part of what made Theranos insular, overprotective. It would be a bridge too far to link it to the cheating.

I mostly agree with the article, I have been in a position of giving business/career advices a few times in my life, and I also remain silent (or plainly refuse to interact with women/poc) for this exact reason.

Whenever I am asked for advices or feedback I am often in a position where I have nothing to win, I would gladly help and genuinely share my knowledge so that other people don't make the same mistakes or gain a different perspective, but there is a small probability I will lose something (reputation, being labeled a sexist or whatever)

Therefore, pure logical reasoning push me toward "not helping".

I am more lenient with people I have known for some time (even if they are just acquaintances). But for strangers/employees who seek advice, I stay far away from women and only interact with them if another person is in a room, or I am being recorded.

She has a good point, and it's not one that can be easily addressed. I doubt there's any way for a "one size fits all" approach. I have had to manage both men and women, and the gender wasn't always a good indicator of the need to be careful in what I say.

But feedback is important. One of the things that I've learned, over the years (not just in tech -long story), is how to give feedback.

I have made some mistakes, and I rapidly learned that I only get one strike, as a manager, and not even that, if I'm not careful.

I have also been in the position of delivering feedback to someone I don't want to piss off, if at all possible (think green, with spandex pants), but it's vital that they absorb what I have to say.

I've learned that electronic communication is best avoided, when delivering feedback; especially negative feedback. Sometimes, I have no choice, but, for example, if we have FtF meeting in a week or so, maybe that is a better time for me to mention that I need to see a better burndown rate, as opposed to sending an email, or Slack message.

Also, in my experience, I've found that it's important to allow "pushback." This is especially important, when talking to smart, self-driven people. I have had people tell me to go piss up a rope, after giving them feedback, didn't react, and they ended up taking the feedback to heart, after cooling down. Sometimes, people just need to feel they got to say something, and giving them a safe place to say it, is important.

Another word for "Clamming Up" is "The Thermocline of Truth."

https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-...

"Clamming Up" because of power dynamics is inherent to hierarchy. This is why relationships with co-founders and employees need to be nurtured carefully. It's the same set of dynamics that happen inside a band.

If you always want candid advice, honest feedback, and critical though unpleasant information to flow freely and undistorted, then you must remember that actions speak louder than words. If someone tried to tell you something you really need to hear, though you may not have wanted to hear it, what did you do? How did you react? It's not enough to just say that you're for honesty and openness. It's not enough to say you value someone's opinion. You have to actually do that!

Did you counter-attack? Did you order your underling to never speak of "it" again? Did you use the differential in power to just shut-up and shut-off? If you were asked to give a detailed account of what the other person had to say, would they be satisfied that you gave a full and fair account of what they were trying to convey? Would you even be able to recall such details, or would your account be sketchy and vague?

Paying your employees well and having a great environment is actually a double-edged sword, here. What happens, if one day, your early employee comes to you with something they know you don't want to hear, and you react badly? What if you raise your voice and manage to make them feel threatened. That employee will get the message that, despite your lip-service, you don't want to hear it. What's that employee going to do? It's not too unlikely they will "get the message" and clam up, go with the flow, and play it safe to keep their cushy 6-figure job. The flow of candid information from that employee will drop by a lot!

Now, to bring things back to the semi-political: If just having hierarchy/authority, period, can raise such sticky problems in communication and corporate epistemology, then let me ask this: What effect would granting power to accusations without evidence have? This is not an argument for the blanket elimination of accusations. Rather, it's an argument for the importance of *evidence."

> I’m not going to suggest a solution to the problem of men clamming up.

I find this a little frustrating, they’ve noticed a pattern of behaviour that concerns them in an area they are clearly invested in - yet they have no thoughts or suggestions on how to address this? Is it possible they are not offering such thoughts because of the same issue they have highlighted in the article?

I must admit I rolled my eyes at the headline, then "rage-clicked" the article to check the first few paragraphs...

...And I'm glad I did, because this article is not what I wrongly expected, and is a good read.

It will challenge your biases regardless of your priors. I feel appropriately chastened.

Separately, another area where upside / downside risk of providing feedback is no longer good is in feedback to rejected candidates for positions.

Folks have said this can still be done, but our office was burnt by giving feedback, and the person in general likes to argue with it which is already a drain.

So anyways, no more feedback to folks not hired - period! Luckily this applies to all hires, you don't know at the early stage if someone is in a protected class.

It's similar to how we get little/no feedback from job interviews and applications because of a couple of outliers making giving feedback not worth the trouble

Has it always been this way or was there a time long ago where it's common to receive feedback? (I've only been working professionally for ~5 years)

> I’m not going to suggest a solution to the problem of men clamming up. This is more of a public service announcement than anything else.

Is there a solution, though? How do we work around this?

I think most of us would like to reach a point where none of this is a concern, and we can just get on with working—yet the prospect of a future without sexism almost seems hopelessly optimistic.

Is this just one of those problems that cannot be solved in a single lifetime? Humanity seems perfectly capable of acknowledging its faults, yet it seems entirely incapable of fixing them. Our status page is always set to “Under Maintenance.”

When we encounter technical barriers, we’re good at overcoming them. Recent events have shown that we’re able to overcome medical hurdles in a manner that our ancestors would have deemed impossible. When will we be able to do the same for social issues?

It's gotten to the point that my first and ongoing assessment of someone is how "cool" they are. Sort of the identity politics version of whether you're the type of person who yells at a waiter. In my experience about 75% of people are cool.

If you're cool, I'm candid around you. If you're not cool, I'm treating you like you're radioactive. Everything I say is carefully considered. Controversy of any kind is studiously avoided. Most likely I avoid dealing with you at all when I can, and certainly avoid being alone with you with no witnesses. If that's sexist or racist I really don't give a damn.

As an investor, of course I clam up. I spend my days looking at the world in terms of risk-adjusted returns and cost benefit analyses, so why would I take a human capital risk? My entire business is based on my reputation and I've seen what happens to the men who get comments like "not the best with women at conferences" or "don't get him too close to your wife." It's limiting beyond your career.

I can count on two hands the number of women I would feel comfortable giving the exact same feedback to as I would a man. Women I can be candid with are women that I have 5+ year relationships with, have backed in some way, and who know I am truly looking out for them.

And the solution is blatantly obvious, but completely unpalatable. Let men grow the same way we believe women and minorities should be allowed to. A male engineering manager being too harsh with a female junior dev is a learning moment for the director of engineering to help the manager, not fire them.

And crucially the line is shifting more and more about what's "obviously fireable." Turns out harsh criticism of the quality of someone's work and the lack of improvement are rational, not an ad hominem. Those things are fixable. But criticism from powerful parties is now scrutinized as dangerous based on identity rather than for the content of the criticism.

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 again" makes your reasoning clear without beating around the bush. How can you twist this into something sexist?

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.

The law prefers letting some who are guilty escape punishment over punishing the innocent.

Mob vigilantism does just the opposite. It does not trust the law to punish all who are guilty, so it punishes on mere accusations without concern for the innocent.

The difference between the two may be the reason fear is so powerful here.

Eventually the only people left on Twitter will be extremists and marketers.

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.

This seems like a classic problem of trust, more than a discussion about gender. I can't imagine investing in a company I didn't trust enough to be candid with, but I guess that's happening, the money in it is probably good.

It's worth saying that people who have no capability to betray you in a certain way are easier to do business with. It limits downside. I'd prefer to have a reputation for defending my friends, but not being credible for a certain attack is an interesting advantage. Perhaps vulgar and obnoxious people will be easier to work with too. I will look for a way to get mobbed that doesn't violate my moral code, might as well break the seal on that so I never make anyone nervous.

It's not just about giving feedback, it's also about how you give it. "You should switch roles" is a terrible piece of feedback. "You are failing to do X, Y, and Z; and Fred is doing those things very well" is much better. It allows for autonomy in determining how the team wants to handle said feedback, whether it's swapping roles, improving at current roles, or going out and finding more aligned investors.

Maybe doing it the first way works, too, but I think it is poor, lazy communication that used the zeitgeist as a crutch to make a difficult point. That doesn't mean it can't be done well and respectfully, which the given example perhaps did not.

Not surprised. A guy like me will say anything, because I'm just a small guy and I do not care what women or their sjw friends think. But these are serious people who play the game. And they have serious money and a serious reputation to protect. So it's much smarter for them to keep their mouths shut or even to avoid putting serious money into female-led firms they can't steer in the right direction.

"Every revolutionary ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic. In the purely historical universe that they have chosen, rebellion and revolution end in the same dilemma: either police rule or insanity."

Albert Camus, The Rebel

As Seinfeld says, if you’re funny, you will succeed (referring to female comedians). But instead people prefer blaming everyone but themselves.

Being a CEO or entrepreneur is not easy for anyone, but victim mentality doesn’t make it any easier for yourself.

See, toxicity destroys business.

I was once told by different toxic people that I lack social competence while working on projects with them (nobody agreed with them on that). The toxicity caused by them made several key people, myself included, jump the ship and the projects tanked. Lessons have been learned.

This is kind of the end result we're heading for, where you can only talk candidly with people who are equal or lower than you on the oppression hierarchy. The shitty part is that I'm pretty sure 99% of people are reasonable human beings but the media has to make it seem like that isn't the case so the risk equation changes. Similar to how kids used to roam around the neighborhood but now it's deemed too risky because the media makes it seem like there are murderers lurking around every corner.

This is a problem that extends far beyond the man to woman relationship. Intellectual mindshare is being locked up due to cancel culture and the fear that unpopular ideas - whether objectively true or not - or even just poor wording could be weaponized and used to attack the person expressing them.

If you think this isn't happening, I challenge you to think of a single unpopular thing that you believe and ask yourself if you'd be comfortable expressing that attached to your real name in a permanently recorded medium.

This is amazing. I'm glad a woman pointed this out.

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.

What is the goal of what we are all doing now? I am in this industry because I want to creatd interesting, innovative products that people want, and which they will give me money for.

It seems like at some point we shifted from optimizing for “innovate” to optimizing for extracting the existing wealth of the Silicon Valley gestalt, and making sure that nobody unfairly got a bigger piece than anybody else.

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.

I have been extremely fortuante that women have always found me very attractive and there is not a single job I've had where female co-workers didn't make comments at work which would not have been seen as extremely inappropriate the other way around. Even when I was 19 and I got my first job some 30+/40+ year old female co-workers heavily flirted with me in the most inappropriate way. I'm not gonna lie, I enjoyed it for many years and definitely have had many fond memories because of it, but equally it has shaped me of how I think of some of the outrage which is happening nowadays the other way around.

I even had married women behave extremely inapproriate, with some groping me in various places, getting me drunk at work parties and trying to get me make a first move if they felt bad about doing it themselves.

It's not like all women at work acted unprofessionally with me, but there was enough inappropriate behaviour that everyone knew about it and guess what, not a single women told another women that this behaviour was not ok.

Interestingly, after I got into a serious relationship and stopped to accept such behaviour I have had many women above me to turn on me and treat me as if I offended them by not flirting back.

All I know is that all humans are the same. Let's pay women an equal wage but please let's not pretend that women in power are any better than men.

Social media has become a totalitarian system. We don’t have to live this way.

This is true, even from (oddly) investors. Met a solo female founder at a coffee shop this week (my state is open). She's a non-technical founder, building an app which is a marketplace that also will compete with Yelp or Google Maps, for a customer segment with no money also hit hard by COVID. All she's heard to date is positive things from everyone. Her app is buggy trash with terrible UX developed offshore at bargain basement rates. Since she's nontechnical it took a while to help her ascertain that it was done in React Native. We had a very long conversation about business principles (lessons I've learned the hard way mostly), all of them came as a very painful shock, like validating the business model before doing a full build out of the app, simple things. Look, I've seem some insane shit succeed and I wish her the best, but somebody filled her head with dreamy bullshit and she knew nothing of business including her market and nobody had yet to ask her a single hard question. All of the questions I asked seemed table stakes, just making conversation about her business, she couldn't answer. Yet an investor from Mexico had given her $10k, to match her personal $7k investment, to build an app.

At some point I had to stop the conversation because I realized that what I was doing was giving her the first honest conversation about her business she'd ever had with anyone and to be honest I wasn't really the person to be giving any advice. Mostly I just asked questions and shared some lessons from similar experiences.

tl;dr: somebody lied to this gal (perhaps through omission) and she's going to learn some hard lessons.

Apologies for any typos.

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.

Female founder here. Just wanted to say I'm much more interested in advice and feedback from other successful founders than investors.

It also seems like investors are more concerned about reputation than founders.

Was going to comment but found myself clamming up and deleting it.

Dialog has chilled, among lots of groups that need to talk more for all of us to benefit.

Some outsider risk takers will use this chill to create new networks and yield some consequent successes.

Society used to have a solution to this problem, it was a very rigorous set of manners and customs, protocol for how to address people that occupy different positions in the social hierarchy. After woman's emancipation and abolition of aristocracy such protocols became redundant, because at least ideologically we were all equal, and now this ideology is gone and a new one will probably require a new set of such social protocols ...

Two points, although not specific to female founders:

Elon Musk's advice: Solicit Negative (constructive) feedback.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/08/elon-musks-advice-to-ceos.ht...

Also, Eespecially for young founders and CEOs, they should study and obtain coaching on how to develop and improve their leadership skills.

I like how the author just describes the situation in a very neutral and insightful way and leave the audience to make up their own opinion. Props to her.

Being completely honest and sincere here, I started responses to a couple of the comments, but decided for both that I didn't want to deal with the possible bashing, downvotes, etc for providing even a reminder of what the point of the original article was and that this issue of men not wanting to give critical feedback because of possibly getting dragged through the mud.

I'm not sure if this is irony or just sadness.

Situation is so bad. I guess there is no easy way out, and many people are hurt, let alone others missing out.

How about creating a tag that would be attached to a person profile anywhere it's online, saying something like "Criticism welcome" or "Criticism is not sexism". So this would serve as assurance of not being willing to pursue any feedback by the tag/badge holder.

It's not news. A female entrepreneur observed similar patterns and talked about it in a TED talk:

Is Modern Feminism starting to undermine Itself? | Jess Butcher | TEDxAstonUniversity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgIgytWyo_A

Unfortunately, I think those kind of videos do no reach their required target: new age feminists. It doesn't help either that the comments on the video are mostly made by men, who are angry at the current social situation in the anglophone countries.

IMO, these social issues are pretty inconsequential compared to the bigger problems we face: climate change and wealth+income inequality worldwide. I believe that social inequality would drastically improve if we concentrated on those major problems first.

Education is the linchpin, imo. Were we to work backwards from that, our world would radically change. You can't concentrate on education if you have to worry about housing, food, transport, and access to education. So, those should be as cheap as possible for every citizen.

Educators should have amongst the highest paying jobs in the country and competition should be fierce to become one at any level.

With an educated populace, there's no telling what we could achieve. We could think and reason for ourselves instead of listening to pundits. We could actually discuss things instead of scream at each other all the time.

But eh... y'all would rather fund another war on some poor country over oil, support another big corp to underpay people you don't care about, huddle into groups and be belligerent against those your group deems the enemy, vote for people who wield fear as a tool, or just be indifferent to the world around you as long as you're doing fine...

It seems as if there's an idea that if we install women in corporate leadership skills we'll get better corporate governance overall. In my experience women's ego can be just as fragile as men's. And guaranteed corporate governance is not necessarily true.

One company I worked for ended up being no different than the good-ol-boy system, except all the men were women -- looking out and protecting each other, figuring out how to screw with employee's yearly reviews in order to game the system for the cabal of women leaders. This was getting to the point that the management chain was vacationing with each other in the south of France.

In one particularly painful case, they celebrated a big cloud move to AWS with T-shirts. The devops engineers who did all the painful up front work to make it happen got t-shirts. When the devops team completely turned over, they left the t-shirts hanging in their cubicles.

While the article is hyper focused on investor founder relationship I'd wager something similar is happening in many other situations. And not just gender but also race. We have made it so anything negative about someone can be trivially reframed in a sexism, rascism, anyism framework.

This will impact society badly for years or decade to come.

Sexism aside I wonder what other identity spheres this kind of trepidation has corrupted valuable feedback in.

Additionally I wonder what other corruption has occurred in productive systems because of these Identity Politics that have been raging to the foreground recently. And finally are these minuses outweighed by the pluses of said politicking?

The other thing here, is "second system effect" I do believe the women founders are getting gazumped, but sometimes, the gazumping will be somebody like Amazon doing it badly at scale, for a price you can't match and with Amazon backed guarantees. Your elegant solution got second-systemed.

Or maybe, it's the double-whammy? They second-systemed you and ghosted you and clammed up all at the same time?

I have experienced sitting in an international research workshop hearing my work played back to be by a PhD student. They're going to be first-to-file because they got peer review and in a commercial research domain, I didn't bother validating my idea properly in the peer-set. It was a lesson in dotting the I and crossing the T if you want recognition for prior work.

Lots on green usernames in this thread.

Perhaps male advisers who are worried about such things could ensure they have a female co-adviser they can have frank conversations with. Why should it fall on one investor to tell the founder that they shouldn't be CEO?

This article is actually a very strong argument for diversity in boards.

I also work in a very “woke culture.” In fact, as a straight, white, cis man I am in the extreme minority.

I have been told that I can’t do my job which includes negotiating with LGBTQ+ companies because I am an “old, white, cis guy and there is always an unfair power dynamic there” just because of my identity. It is discrimination plain and simple, but I literally stand to have my career derailed if I fight back. One accusation and I don’t get hired again.

I joined the company because I believed, and still believe in company mission which is LGBTQ+ focused.

There is no room for allies at some companies and they silence opinions they don’t like. It hurts everyone.

For candor, reduce the risk of blow back by giving the advice in person or over the phone. California law is very strict in recording conversations.

Yes, a guy could screw it up and say something potentially sexist or just dumb — but for success what someone is doing wrong needs to be expressed.

I feel like history is going to look at this phenomenon as a strange curiosity, the same way we look at the Inquisition or the Salem Witch Trials today or even some of the communist revolutions.

People will say "It's pretty unbelievable that happened, because no sane individual would ever condone something so extreme."

Anecdotal but my office is ultra-woke. There are endless internal emails about whatever-week, or veterans-this, or LBGTQ+-that etc etc. People have been hounded out and either quit or been fired for fairly minor "infractions" of the groupthink (...and also some people have rightly been fired for actual inappropriate behaviour).

And guess what all this talk about "toxic masculinity" and generally vilifying all men leads to? If you said "chilling effect" then you are bang on. It is a bloody minefield. Keep your head down, never talk about non-work stuff, refuse to provide feedback or do interviews, refuse to help people out unless it is directly your job' responsibility to do so etc and hope you don't get fired.

It genuinely feels like I have a target on my back.

> I’m not going to suggest a solution to the problem of men clamming up. This is more of a public service announcement than anything else.

I suppose one solution is for women to first gain the trust of the men whose honest opinion they want to hear. Maybe just some comments that explode the unspoken tensions, like “My friend Chad said he thinks my male co-founder should be CEO, and maybe he’s right, but I don’t fully trust his judgement because he can be quite old fashioned and, to be honest, sexist. But that doesn’t necessarily make him wrong in this instance. Could you give me your honest opinion?” It’s then easy for the man to respond.

Important to understand that the fear of a false accusation does not actually depend on false accusations actually existing. People can imagine an accusation being leveled at them, falsely or truly, without observing any “prior art.”

This is a really great piece. While it's unfortunate this phenomenon occurs, in a way it's also an opportunity for the many talented female VCs in the industry. I hope they capitalize on it!

My advice to white men: how many white men have “made their careers” by getting involved in these issues vs. how many have ended their careers? The risk reward profile is bonkers.

Anecdotally, I've heard from men at a couple different startups who have changed their personal behavior towards women due to fear of false accusations, in ways that could negatively impact womens' careers.

The one concrete example that comes to mind is mentoring: Not wanting to take a special interest in a more junior team member's career development, or have lots of one-on-one meetings, because she's a woman and they're worried about accusations of sexual harrassment.

There are aspects of NVC that can apply. In particular, speak first with observations, in a manner that can be corrected. Once a dialogue is established, look for signals the other party is willing to receive feedback. Conversely, if they are not engaged, backoff politely.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication#Com...

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.

If I were in the situation presented in this article, I'd simply speak my mind. I'm fairly sure that I've been a good ally to the women and non-binary folks in my life, and that people who know me would be quick to defend accusations of misogyny or bias. And if that proved to be incorrect, I'd re-evaluate whether I was doing enough to further women and non-binary people in the tech industry.

If, as most in this comment section have, you see yourself as having to keep quiet in the situation presented in this article, ask yourself: who would defend me, and who would throw me under a bus, and why? Think long and hard about why the people around you wouldn't rush to defend your character. Ask yourself if it's really that the feminists are out to cancel you, or if there's a sliver of validity there.

You don't have to be perfect. But there's a large gulf between most people's words and their behavior. That's the real root of the issue here. Merely paying lip service to equality doesn't indemnify you from accusations of bias. If you really truly act as an ally, people will take notice and defend you when the cancel culture comes knocking.

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.

It's good to see the laws of yichud into the workplace and other work related areas too. Paying extra attention to what you say is just an extension to that since it's impossible to have a shomer guard what's being said and how it might be interpreted.

Reminds me of the controversy with ArenaNet and Jessica Price moreso than Elizabeth Holmes tbh

I wrote a long reply to this and then binned it. Perhaps that captures the essence of what I was going to say.

This is real, and it's also a type of sexism. Not all forms of sexism or discrimination are acts of malice. The sexual harassment training required for my job speaks explicitly about disparate treatment.

I do question one of the examples a bit. The idea of giving advice to female founder to step down as CEO in favor of a male cofounder sounds like bad advice. It's pointing out one rather drastic solution, rather than the actual problem. Better advice would be to lay out the observed issues and help think through a range of possible solutions, if everyone can get on the same page about the problems. Maybe the solution would still be a change in roles, but there's a lot less chance it would seem sexist the advice were predicated on a lot more information.

This happens if you are the one person of race A in a group of race B too.

I increasingly find myself on the axis of "dont" for a lot of reasons:

* Age (why do older people always assume their prior experience in stone-age computers informs modern age computing? Sometimes it does, but often it doesn't)

The contra case is: amazingly large number of truisms found in the 50s 60s and 70s hold true today as well.

* Experience (why do experienced people always assume you can explain things to inexperienced people? Some things have to be experienced to be understood)

The contra case is that some uplifts can be done, and don't have to be experienced. But how to decide which ones?

So this men clamming up thing can be at least two other reasons for holding schtum: Maybe its not about mars/venus but is about age and experience concerns?

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 uncommon in the startup world. It happens all the time. But because she's a minority female and her competitor is a white man, it suddenly becomes an example of white supremacy and the patriarchy conspiring to oppress her. The VCs who funded the competitor? Obviously racists and sexists, and she called them out explicitly as that on Twitter.

I considered reaching out to her to offer some perspective, but ultimately demurred. Why? I didn't want to be caught in the wurlitzer. Better to let her make more problems for herself than offer a sense of perspective that could get me cancelled.

Sexism is not a fixed category. Every comment falls on a spectrum between absolutely sexist and absolutely not sexist.

But when we evaluate how sexist a comment was, it's much simpler to label it as "sexist" or "not sexist". This label loses all context, especially when we share it with someone who wasn't there or otherwise doesn't have that context.

So outside of the fact that sexism exists, this problem isn't specific to culture or Twitter. It's a result of how we interpret, compress, and share reality with each other.

This article demonstrates exactly why I’ve tended not to get as up-in-arms as some of my fellow male colleagues when it comes to gender/workplace issues. Sure, sometimes it seems like the pushback against the male dominated culture of some industries can push a little too far leading to unintended consequences like the author illustrates. But, sooner or later those get recognized and things tend to self-correct. Who ever said that dealing with entrenched, thorny issues isn’t messy and fraught with inefficiencies?

As a serial entrepreneur, I think the value of "advice" is overstated. Just go out there and build and fail and listen to customers and iterate. Most people don't know what they're talking about, it's just men are more self-confident in sharing. Elon is not where he is today because he listened to advice. If we want to improve the situation the article addresses, we need more women in executive and VC roles.

I see this as something that can be partly alleviated, e.g. by some of the suggestions raised by the other comments, but fundamentally unavoidable until sexism is no longer rampant. Because real sexists are so present, you can't really know if someone saying something a sexist would say is speaking from prejudice or clear judgment, not until you get to know them better.

A business is a business. As a female founder I have a gender agnostic email I can use to cold ask any investor a business question and see if they respond and how thoughtfully before ever approaching for a pitch. Upside to that is it eliminates your own fear of being biased against in the answer and you can take the answer at heart.

There are many types of founders out there but two stand out: those who do a lot and don’t really sell themselves, and those that sell all the time but never execute (you see them posting. lot of pitch competition wins, necker island visit, private jets, etc) . The former you can see year over year chugging along, iterating quietly, making sure unit economics work, etc. The female founder groups have many people who have been clearly iterating on their projects for years, trying to bootstrap and not have to ask for permission, because it never comes or it comes with bad terms. Then just ask how many of them have seen competitors raise millions on a promise and the floodgates will open. The competitors have a lot of confidence and usually little to no experience or genuine insight. Not sure if that needs to be called or sexism, because Dunning–Kruger makes a lot more sense. The problem is when investors buy it.

On Clubhouse a few months ago, a well known investor said the pandemic has leveled the playing field between charismatic bravado driven founders and those who have execution strengths (the charisma doesn’t do so well via Zoom). So now investors who interview entirely online get to ask more substantive questions and not be swayed by confidence as much. Not sure how much that lasts during reopening, but one can hope.

Surely the solution is to get female investors involved where this is a concern?

The structural sexism in this story is arguably the investor choosing to spare himself the minor risk to reputation, the assumption that the CEO isn't likely enough to listen to the advice fairly for it to be worth giving.

(it's not at all a given that the situation would blow up in his face…)

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.

Consequences are one hell of a thing.

I'm reading a whole lot of frustrated comments here and totally get where the frustration is coming from. But in a different direction, I wanted to offer a thought for how to improve:

Rule #1: Always ask people if they want feedback before you give it. Do it for men, women and non-binary folks. If you can, give hints about the topic ("hey, would you like feedback about your skills alignment with the problem?").

I've always been amazed at how much better feedback is received by anyone when they've explicitly agreed to hear it.

the quick and dirty solution would be for any male VC to partner up with a female VC to deal with such situations.

It seems the main problem is modern (woke) society and by that I mean indoctrination.

It's really the fault of the media, school and everyone else who pushes the unnuanced narrative that everything must be judged thru sexist or racist lenses. In that climate where our shortcomings are someone else's fault because they are by default inherently sexist or racist, this is what you will end up with. And so those who could help avoid at all costs any possibility of being viewed though that lens. Ergo the clamming up.

So we end up with people who don't practice critical skills, though they have them, and believe the narrative unreservedly because they have been taught this way. It's lose-lose for us all. Men lose, women lose and American society loses.

It is absolutely unforgivable that we allow terms such as “mansplaining” to exist and be used unfettered and then on the other had deride their position because ! men not explaining things candidly !

Something has to give.

Obviously obnoxious behaviour should be curbed but the usage of mansplaing (and I would argue: the minting of the term when we have an equivalent in “condescending”)

I don’t even know what to say. I know I am rather shy to give advice to women because I’ve been bullied on Twitter for explaining things even when SOMEONE ASKED FOR CLARITY!

> 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 appreciate the effort to think of a better word than sexism. My question is, is this even sexism at all? How many men can get publicly denounced as “sexists” and have their life ruined because they didn’t speak carefully enough, before it is simply just “smart” rather than “sexist” to be extra careful with how you speak to women.

To take the example to an extreme just to illustrate the point: If, in a hypothetical world, men served jail time for making eye contact with women, would it be sexist for men to stare at their feet when women are around?

I am 100% convinced that sexism does exist and is not all that uncommon (I’ve seen my wife deal with it a bit in the workplace). I’m just not convinced this is an example of it. Seems more like it’s the “safe” choice for a man in 2021. Both men and women would benefit if we worked to make it not that way.

I’m a white cis male, and I work as a software engineer at a Silicon Valley unicorn. My employer is a perennial darling of the HN crowd, and is likely to continue its rocket ride in the years to come.

I’ll be completely candid here: I have some kind of problem with women. This isn’t to say that I don’t like women or don’t want women to succeed. I just don’t want to associate with or be seen around women. I’m sure there’s some kind of deep reason for this, but I haven’t exactly been looking for it.

On the other hand, I’m a huge believer in the “live and let live” principle. I found a good way of reconciling these two sides of my personality. Whenever I’m thrust into a situation in which I must interact with women, I gracefully extricate myself from it.

I’m very sneaky about this too. Sometimes my departure can be performed swiftly, but other times I must maneuver over a period of days or weeks to get myself away from an unpleasant situation. I’m never overt about it, I never hurt anyone in the process, and I’m pretty confident that no one has any idea that I’m like this.

In the past I’ve had to abandon projects I was working on, and even ditched maintainership of a popular open source project because a female coworker started contributing to it. Given that I’ve been doing this for a couple of decades, I’m willing to say that I’d do more or less anything to get away from women, as long as no one gets hurt. Yes, it might take a while, and I might need to make some sacrifices, but I’ll eventually get away.

Of course this started way before Twitter mobs and cancel culture became a thing, so I can’t claim prescience. But I do permit myself a little smugness at this point in time. I think I’m pretty much cancel-proof.

Reminds me of the phenomenon recorded of men avoiding women after the original #metoo thing.

Part of this is that I think that men feel they are walking on egg shells. The kinds of male assertiveness that my wife found attractive when she met me also can leave women who aren't into this assertiveness feeling harassed.

I feel that we need to be clear more about what is "desirable" masculinity it "desirable assertiveness" vs its toxic counterparts. Failure to do this will essentially neuter men over the long term - and it will lead to "men clamming up" or worse, a significant surge in the number of men who "go their own way" be it in the job or at home in their personal life.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/aug/29/men-wom...

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/men-are-afraid-to-mentor-f...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellevate/2019/01/09/dear-sir-do...

https://kelainetaylor.medium.com/to-the-men-whose-response-t...

I had an experience at work where a coworker (who is black) shared his experience of being told to "stay in his lane" early on in his career. The insinuation was of course racism, he didn't mention it but it was obvious. Then I and someone else (who are white) shared our exact same experiences.

He told me he felt cut off, etc, even though we were sharing the same experience. If we had something similar happen, how can he definitively attribute that experience to racism? Even if it was, that was not the point of the conversation. We were all sharing our experiences on that topic and no one mentioned race. Why do we need to bend ourselves backwards to make sure all minorities feel comfortable all the time?

The point here is you can't talk to minority groups about anything these days, if you are white.

Knowledge of history has gone down, year over year. Students are more likely to get a propagandized and highly skewed caricature of history that leaves out certain "inconvenient truths." This is also an overcorrection.

I went into this article thinking it was going to be an outrage piece about men being sexist towards women. Instead it's about men being afraid of being accused of being sexist.

This is a very real issue. It's already gotten to the point where the people behind the movement are hysterically unreasonable and irrational. Literally even feminists who are integral parts of the movement itself aren't safe from their own vitriol.

Below is an TED talk about the story of a activist feminist who had her entire activist career destroyed simply by saying something that the cancel culture disagreed with:

https://youtu.be/3WMuzhQXJoY

Why would you talk to women at all professionally, unless there are reliable witnesses or video recordings?

As we increasingly see, witch hunts are already possible by deliberately misinterpreting written statements like mails or bug tracker messages.

I would not want to get into a he-said-she-said real life situation. Mike Pence understood this early.

>I’m not going to suggest a solution to the problem of men clamming up.

Well gee how about people stop blaming white males for every problem in the world, cancelling them for the slightest "microaggression", etc. Maybe that would make society a bit more equal?

It should would be nice to talk openly with coworkers and peers without worrying about offending someone over the slightest thing.

There's a rhetorical pattern I see in many articles, this one included, that perpetuates the issue this article is trying to address: men are the problem. Before, it was men saying bad things. Now, it's that men aren't saying things at all.

"I’m not going to suggest a solution to the problem of men clamming up." If not, then perhaps that's the wrong problem statement, and solutions will become more readily obvious and suggestible when not coached as the problem of men.

That's as candid as I can make it, and I feel that I have to use a throwaway account to do so.

>I don’t think most female founders even realize that they’re getting different advice than their male counterparts. Silicon Valley has always run on candor, but it’s being stifled at the moment, and no one is noticing that we are the collateral damage.

Imagine what it's like being the intended target and not just "collateral damage". It's not a problem that men are nervous to be candid but it's a problem that women are feeling the secondary effects of that?

Creating a throwaway for obvious reasons. I'm not an investor but someone who is in a position to make key decisions about peoples' careers and give advice, and I do have a bit of a trick I use for this.

There was one black female mentee who I noticed was timid in taking credit for her work. I had recently attended a diversity panel where someone in a similar role as me said that in a similar situation, and her advice to her mentee was "Think about what a white man would do" and everyone applaud such an insightful advice. So identifying such an opportunity, I said the exact same thing word for word, basically "I see you're hesitating to take credit for your work. Think about what a white man would do."

Immediately after saying that, I could tell it wasn't taken well, and she asked "what does that mean?" I couldn't come up with an answer for that which wouldn't be taken in a really bad way, so I backpedaled. She later reported me to an administrative person who luckily felt it was too vague to file a serious report about, but told me to watch what I say.

But I do have a solution (my trick). From that point on, I definitely give more subtle advice unless they have passed my test, which is I see how they react to situations where they could give the benefit of the doubt to others in vague situations. Sometimes, I'll bring up a past story about another anonymous person and see if they are outraged and want to get them in trouble. Only the ones who remark that they probably had good intentions, and don't react too strongly, I'll give more candid advice to.

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Seems like online twitter mobs and callouts are actually counterproductive to the "-isms" that employ them. Too bad but expect more of the same as we've basicslly given a global megaphone to any hyper-purist or power-tripper with a social media account. This stops when people have to pay a price for engaging in a cancel action.

Please stop treating social issues like this as if they're Physics. There is no clear path to an answer and the more we try to reason and argue about these topics logically the more futile the attempt, it's like kicking harder and harder while in stuck in quicksand.

The effects of trying to find the truth show themselves as bi-products that affect culture and society in unhealthy and unforeseen ways. You can never know the intent of someone or why they act the way they do, you can only guess and even that takes a special type of person who feels comfortable enough doing so (reads lawyers) and a framework that encourages such speculation (legal system [0] or stock market.) Speculative systems are toxic and are festering ground for bias. If we want to live in a world ruled by truth and facts ironically the way to do it is not by forcing ourselves to understand something that is not Physics as if it is and by the same methods.

Ignore everything that pops up on these topics if your goal is to create a better society for all.

[0] some legal cases are clear cut, I'm not referring to those.

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 extremists themselves. There's no moving forward with division, this whole thing is probably good for the rest of the world.

Good looking women (and men) have an easier time making progress in their carrier at least up to the point when everybody starts assuming they just got where they are because of their looks.

Companies with an explicit diversity and inclusion statement on their job applications get more minority applicants but hire proportionally less minority candidates, speculation range from smug interviewers to interviewees being too concerned with being themselves.

Everyone playing the suppression olympics loses in the end.

should be more female investors

ITT: a lot of white guys showing their true colors.

Founders swapping titles is enough to decide success of a company? Interesting relationship dynamic.

I don’t know what it is but something about the vibe here feels fake. Like the opening anecdote with the investor definitely sounds fabricated — too “Aesop’s Fables” for me.

It seems to me that a solution to this problem would be to have half the investors be women. Or get rid of PE entirely and come up with a different way to fund projects (think NSF).

Notice how this article is (ostensibly) written by a woman. And because it's written by a woman, it's now OK to think this, so men are out in droves agreeing.

This article is evidence in its own right of the real problem. Men are afraid to say what they think lest they get cancelled by a woman and her army of men.

I can't be the only one who thinks this is bullshit, right? The scenario described in the article isn't a dilemma unless the gender of the CEO is part of your reason. If it's not, you will have some rational explanation and should be able to point to your history of not being a sexist asshole.

The solution to this is simple:

Practice your communication skills. If you can’t think of a way to phrase advice that might be offensive, you are failing in intermediate communication skills.

If you think it might be offensive, ask a close female in your life, your sister, your mother, grandma, etc.

It’s in everyone’s best interest to treat others with love and respect.

For extra safety, if you really think there is a risk, actually record the audio encounter for back up.

If you actually go through these steps for building towards good communication, it’s highly unlikely you would ever have to use the recording in defense.

I don't think the author needed to bring "false accusation" into the picture here, and in fact it weakens the point. I think male investor saying to a female CEO that her male colleague is better suited to the CEO role would be taken, ipso facto, as sexism. No falsehoods need enter the picture.

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, when we work to raise people up, we do so at some cost to the people who are already at the top. This could be an example of that, I think.

“One worrying trend I’ve observed among my male investor friends is that they’re much more wary of giving candid advice to women founders than they used to be. They are afraid of saying anything that a female founder might misinterpret as sexism. So, when giving feedback to a woman they don’t know well enough to trust, they talk with less candor than they would with a male founder.¹ When this happens, women are missing out on potentially valuable advice.”

Oh. My. God. Just ask the person if they want your advice.

It’s the same in the (presumably male-dominated) workplace as it is in anywhere, such as giving unsolicited advice to someone at the (usually male-dominated) rock gym.

While I have no doubt that the author's examples are true, and of course sometimes feedback is misinterpreted. However, I've never found this line of argument compelling.

Yes, as a man, sometimes you do have to be careful about how you give feedback to female founders, coworkers, or employees. It's a skill to be developed just like 1,000 other little skills you need to develop be reasonably successful in life.

This same "but men might get in trouble for an innocent mistake" argument was used when women first entered the workforce to decry the unreasonable burden having to work with women placed on men. You still see variations on it today.

Yes, Twitter mobs are a thing and the people who participate in them are horrible. But if you are having trouble giving feedback to women, that is not women's fault. It is simply a skill you need to develop.

  And the consequences of being accused of sexism by an 
  online mob have now become so extreme that many investors 
  don’t want to risk it anymore. 

Forgive me, but, what exactly are these "consequences"? I can see it for e.g. line employees, especially in communications or media roles, but for investors? What happens, they lose some Twitter followers? Slightly fewer companies beg them for money? I've never ever heard of an investor suffering at all because of social media outrage and I'm tempted to speculate it's never happened.

If someone avoids certain social situations or conversations out of anxiety that women might suddenly think they are awful, might that not say more about them than about women?

When people talk about accusations of sexism like they are a hidden landmine someone might accidentally step on, it makes me wonder about the person's soft skills. Not just the inability to have insight into what might come off as sexist, but also a lack of experience in how to respond when one makes a mistake and does something sexist.

If you want to be able to talk openly and honestly with someone and give feedback, you should build a relationship with them so there is mutual trust and respect.

Ideally you don't have a fixed outcome or solution in mind when you talk with them about the issue, other than helping them make the best decision regarding the issue. If you think you know what's best without discussing it with someone and getting their thoughts, you are arguably disrespecting them.

If you can't have that sort of conversation, at the very least you need to lay out your reasoning and experience when giving feedback.

Preferably you do both, using both a past constructive relationship and your reasoning to discuss an issue and talk about potential solutions that they can decide on.

Otherwise you aren't providing constructive feedback, you are just giving your opinion.

Yes, woke culture creates an atmosphere where men and non-minorities may be overly cautious about what they do and say, possibly to everyone’s detriment.

But let’s be clear here. That’s not the root cause. The root cause is the undeniably real treatment of women and minorities that created that reactionary mode.

A number of people I talk to (curiously, they tend to be production engineers) think we live in a meritocracy where racism and sexism have virtually been erased. They usually believe a calvinist work ethic and capacity for enduring suffering creates an equal opportunity for everyone. But that’s just not true. I’ve seen cabs skip Black people hailing them to stop at me. I have heard the n-word used disparagingly, liberally and freely at informal gatherings in central Pennsylvania or by drivers for car dealership service centers.

I am very close to a woman lawyer who is regularly challenged about her school and where she passed the bar in a way that doesn’t match the experience of her male colleagues. I have seen video clips of a professor making inappropriate remarks about a student’s looks during a review of her work. It’s anecdotal, but not hard to find.

So, when you are upset that everyone is holding statements up to the light and wondering if someone’s ethnicity or gender is behind them, blame the people who actually caused it. It’s not the fault of ‘woke’ people or those who ‘virtue signal.’ It’s people who are actually, consciously or not, discriminating and perpetuating discrimination. They are at fault.

Clearly shows the need for diversity at all levels of the economy and what a problem the dominance of white men (some of my best friends are white men) has been

If Amazon ever cracks down on fake 5-star review bots (yeah, I know), maybe those clowns can start a new service.

If you're falsely accused of being That Guy, you can just hire them to fill your twitter feed with glowing reviews of your character from "women".

Or crank up the Ashley Madison fembots to do it.

This is a very relevant article to everyone in business. Men and women.

I wouldn’t say this publicly and am saying it here due to a reasonable amount of anonymity (that’s a symptom of the problem).

There are behaviours that are universally toxic and destructive. Sexual abuse, sexual objectification, violence, etc.

These are all behaviours, generally, more commonly found in males. I think a lot of males have understood this and over corrected. This over correction “may” now be going too far.

Little is said about toxic behaviour more commonly associated with women:

Gaslighting, manipulation through victimisation, sexual suggestion for preferential treatment, gossiping, etc.

I think education needs to start early in school about what’s not acceptable.

I have a feeling that’s going to start happening once society realises that focusing only on male behaviour is also to the detriment of women.

My first take on the article is that the author overestimates the impact and even the causality of an investor giving founders advice to swipe roles. It makes it sound simple and so reduced that to turn a company around is just having founders swiping roles.

But that’s beside the point of the article. Ultimately I think it’s on men to learn how to handle giving candid advice in a non-sexist manner. This investor just considered his investment not enough to be worthy bothering to try to find a way to give the same advice in a non-sexist way.

My final take of the article is: founders, don’t listen to advice made by investors who invested a small enough portion of their portfolio to even care if your chances as a company to be successful improve or not.