For a couple of the key initial investors, they were clearly willing to look the other way and give her a pass on certain behaviors because they wanted her to be successful. George Shultz also saw her as a certain sort of daughter figure and went out of his way to protect her against accusations of fraud.
She also emulated the mannerisms and speech patterns of male peers when presenting herself.
Personally, I don't much care for bringing it up too much. No one discusses the role gender played in Madoff's ponzi scheme because it wasn't really relevant to the case. It seems an unfair double standard to bring it up when a woman is accused of it.
Men being able to hype their bullshit (edit: I mean outright fraudulent business plans) because they garnered backers via the casting couch isn't typical as far as I know. So I think her gender is pertinent and as a woman I have spent a lot of time trying to sort out how one gets taken seriously for your work.
And people finding it rude or something for me to want to discuss that are people essentially telling me "We can't let you figure out how to succeed because your interest in figuring that out is excessively gauche. So just stay poor and continue to go hungry. It sucks to be you and you aren't allowed to aspire to having it not suck."
Edit: I don't mean the band.
I guess it cuts both ways - she certainly garnered more attention than your average unicorn startup CEO. Now those same forces are working against her.
Yes, she's gotten massively more sympathetic coverage than Madoff.
Links to things I dared to open my mouth and say in the past:
Me commenting on how I think her gender impacted things:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11450442
Me commenting on my frustration at the amount of press the debacle got:
My observation is that she is a pretty blonde white woman, and I wonder how much harder it would be for a large black woman or a short Indian woman with an accent to accomplish the same thing. It wouldn't surprise most people to hear there may have been some favoritism involved, especially now that she's been revealed as a fraud. The truth is some people are just favored in society and others aren't. I wish it weren't so, I'm certainly not in the favored group, but I can't help but run into that observation in different realms of life. Attractive people tend to get better jobs, more romantic interest, and even babies prefer looking at attractive faces more.
But to say everything she accomplished is because she was a woman is.. well a gross oversimplification. She must have been talented just by virtue of the fact that she was able to create as large a fraud as she did. In trying to avoid sounding like they're simplifying her down to just her looks,I think a lot of people may just avoid conversion instead of trying to create a carefully crafted argument one way or the other. I wonder if even what I wrote won't come off the wrong way. But to me, she employed both her intelligence and her looks in order to get her objective(the latter specifically at least in her affair).
Your second comment (double quoted here to emphasize that it's a quote you made up) says ""Yup, that's what happens when a woman is in charge of a business"" which I would also describe as a pretty extreme mischaracterization of the reaction to her behavior.
My first comment was carefully worded to try to avoid drama and isn't a full expression of my thinking.
A more accurate statement would be that I think you likely wouldn't have seen a company that was nothing but hot air reach a valuation of $10 billion with a man in charge. Someone would have gone "Hold up. Where is the evidence?" a lot sooner.
My second comment was me expressing my concerns about public opinion and how it gets shaped. It wasn't characterizing how she ran the company at all.
A lot of stuff gets understood as subtext or due to context. I expressed my feelings and fears and there was strong pushback against that which seems also rather rooted in bias to me. A woman feeling like "God, this looks really bad and I fear how it will impact general perception of women in business." really shouldn't be any kind of drama at all. Yet it was.
Edit: Excerpt from a blog post I wrote at the time expanding on my thoughts on my first comment:
I feel this is a very widespread issue and a very serious issue. For most women, like me, it holds us back and we struggle to get anywhere. The lack of constructive friction means we just cannot get traction at all. For Ms. Holmes, a confluence of events caused that lack of friction to grow a pipe dream, a fantasy, to incredible proportions due to a lack of brakes in the system. There was a lack of genuine checks and balances. Now, reality is finally intruding and it is a debacle.
It is too late to help Ms. Holmes. She just has to pay the piper now. She may never be taken seriously. But I wish this disaster would foster more constructive discussion about the very real problems female founders face.
My pre-edit post had a sentence that was poorly written, and it still might be unclear. My point was meant to be that the coverage of Holmes has very much not described the situation as what happens when a woman is in charge. I also think you're not accurately portraying what she has done. She is not some misguided founder who came up with an idea that failed but then just continued to fail up because men were too enamored with her to tell her the truth. She deliberately and repeatedly committed fraud - a crime. She knew her product didn't work, and she went through great efforts to lie about it. The greater context is even more damning when you consider the influence peddling, Jobs costume, fake deep voice, etc.
I think the pushback you saw is because your point is ignoring the reality of Holmes's actions to make a separate point. In no way is Holmes a victim of a lack of constructive feedback. I can also understand how it could be concerning that all women leaders will get painted with the same brush as her, but I think virtually all serious coverage of Theranos has described her as an exceptional criminal, not a portrait of women in leadership.