Plenty of male-led businesses also turned out to be scams, and yet no one goes 'that guy looks sharp, but he is male so seems suspicious'. Which only proofs how deep sexism is rooted.
But now "female led" has entered the conversation as something to recognize a scam by. Whenever it comes up again this memory will lit up and make people wary.
It’s rarely “just pattern recognition at work.”
Are priests the pinnacle of trust in your society? You now get a lot of scammers pretending to be (or actually becoming) priests.
Are sagely tech leaders announcing the latest new thing on their thought-leadership blogs the way to get investment money? You now have 99% of LinkedIn's membership.
Is there a push to reduce qualifications in order to bring in people who don't historically enter your profession? No matter how kind or society-changing you're being, scammers will see that you're doing that, and will abuse that mercilessly.
They likewise bilk people who oppose that ideology, and will gladly present themselves as collecting for disadvantaged white boys, before running off with the money.
Anything that turns your brain off, whether it's tugging your heartstrings, endorsing your ideology, whatever, scammers are ready to take advantage. You don't have to harden your hearts, but you do have to engage your brain and apply suitable skepticism and scrutiny of their claims.
TheLastPsychiatrist used a good phrase to describe this: cognitive kill-switch. Anything that stops further examination or exploration of an assertion is a CKS. In Holmes' case, the CKS was "you're just sexist if you don't believe"...
Only by sexists.
If she never mentioned being female I don't remember it. In fact she used to talk in a fake man-voice to sound serious. Other people used the fact that she was a woman to sell the scam because it is still uncommon for a woman to be in that position. There was no possible way for her to avoid it, even by pulling her hair back hard, talking in a goofy deep voice, and dressing like Jobs.
edit: my point, if it's not clear, is that the fact that women founders are fewer is why people focused on her being a woman. If that's used to ignore future woman founders, making them rarer, it's a degenerate pattern recognition.
Prejudice means to form an opinion before the facts are in, but if the facts are there and support you, it is not prejudice.
Discrimination is fairly broad, but in this case can be summarized as preventing someone to get a job due to who they are as a person.
Having established what these words mean, I think it is difficult to entertain the idea that sexism played a role in women being underrepresented as founders in the 2020s. Also, as I have no data on this, I am not sure if the claim of underrepresentation is itself a prejudice or not.
How many women try and succeed? How many men try and succeed? I do not expect to have the percentage be vastly different in the last ten years.
I'm also not sure why you're bringing up "in the 2020s" as a counterargument against the idea that Theranos was not an outlier at the time it operated when it shut down in 2018.
The scam was sold on her gender ("successful female entrepreneur"), so unfortunately it's going to be part of the heuristic.
Male-led scams aren't sold on the gender of the scammer; gender is completely ignored (No one describes those as "a successful male entrepreneur").
Unfortunately, the gender sale was a big part of the scam. I'm looking at many male-led scams, and they did not sell it based on the gender of the scammer.
> Which only proofs how deep sexism is rooted.
No, it only proves that you have ideology deeply rooted. I believe you see sexism everywhere. The type of person you just want to say "oookay, huh, is sexism here, in the room with us?"
That doesn't mean that Holmes didn't benefit from such coverage, she obviously did, but to call it part of the scam as if it was under her control seems a bit far fetched.
We're going to find out anyway in the movie how she markets herself (and maybe how she marketed herself in the past).
She was sold as a successful Stanford dropout, a genius who had a simple idea and assembled a very powerful group of people to push the idea and a ton of funding. Nobody is saying we shouldn't trust Stanford dropouts anymore.
Is, uh, "sexism" in the room with us now?
Look at this entire thread: Holmes was widely acknowledged to have a board that got her contracts that she should never have gotten. She got her investment money because of family connections.
Yet this entire thread is all about "oh but she was a woman and woman have it easy" despite no other women to point at all.
The lack of critical thinking is just astounding, usually HN is far more sharp.
There are hundreds of Standord dropouts running startups. And if they do fraud, people call it out, the media reports it as fraud, investors and customers leave, and that's the end.
But Holmes successfully marketed herself with gender as a central part of her story, so that people like you would defend her, promote her and dismiss criticism against the company or product because you're so sure that it's sexism and not legitimate criticism.
The only reason the Theranos fraud got as far as it did was because everyone calling it a fraud got silenced and cancelled as sexists. Now that it's finally over they're saying "See! We told you!" and yet you persist in "No, you're just a sexist".
You are confused about what the thread is about which confirms the point being made that you are looking for offense.
This thread is about my memory of a bschool professor being more excited about holmes gender and age than in what she's actually done (which would also be weird even if holmes turned out to be a non fraud)
The broader point is that my professor was representative of a group of people which wanted Holmes to succeed because of who she was. Did they cause some degree of blindness? Probably!
That's not saying "women have it easy" to any degree. That part is in your head so you are literally offended by something you made up.
Try steering a fast horse with blinders. Most people here hit a fucking wall at mach 7 when you try to show them reality.
We're all going to find out when we see the movie anyway, right? We're going to see how she markets herself.
Male is still the default gender in society. Especially in SV.
If we were desperate for red-headed founders then the risk of any given red-head riding the wave of hype rather than substance is higher than at baseline.
That's the point being made. Your comment about male led misses it because there's currently no hype about male led. Though I can see it coming back.
Management is not just about qualification, it's also about the human aspect.
I have seen enough toxic femineity at work to say it is actually a thing, on par with toxic masculinity.
Vote me down all you want, women are just as capable as men in every way, including the wrong, toxic ones
Only if you're determined to look for it.
No one promotes companies, or gives special grants, or runs special funding groups, or special networking breakfasts, for men. It's only for women. Women are currently viewed as intrinsically a good thing to run a company, and it's a problem if your company has fewer than 50% women. It's all about identity and not competence. She rode that wave.
Men ride other waves, but specifically not that one. Unless you count trans women in sports. Or Tim Walz.
> Even this “trans women in sports” issue you brought up for no reason is deeply rooted misogyny in action. As soon as someone becomes a woman they are a second-class citizen.
Claiming this does not make it so. I said nothing misogynistic. You can't just claim this any more and expect people to believe you, because who would lie about a thing like that? People now know that someone such as yourself would definitely lie, and so they will check for themselves. You need evidence.
> Case in point: there has been zero outrage about trans men. If you looked at a trans man you’d never suggest that a person who looks like this [1] should compete in women’s sports. You’d probably never even realize they were trans unless you were specifically told.
That's because a lot of the aim of society is to protect women, in various ways. So men who claim to be women who can beat women in women-only sports competitions, or can go in their changing rooms or bathrooms means women are not being afforded the protections we have tried to give them. That's why we have different bathrooms, changing rooms, and sports contests in the first place. No one cares about a woman entering a men's sporting contest, because a) she almost certainly will never get anywhere and b) if she did, it would be an amazing achievement, and would be men losing out, which very few people would care about.
> Just so you are factually and scientifically informed, when trans women transition, they are taking hormone replacement therapy that blocks testosterone. It tends to make them significantly worse at sports as a result.
No, you are misinforming here. They don't have to do anything. "Self ID" exists. That's why a male rapist claiming to be a woman got put in a woman's prison in Scotland[0]. Also, for those who do take hormones, hormones don't help with lung capacity, size, Q angle, bone density, and all the many other things that make men better at sport.
No one cares about women entering a sporting contest in the men's category because there is no such thing. There are open categories, and there are restricted categories. The women's category is a restricted category, because 50% of the population deserve their own champions. Just like there are childrens' categories, categories for people who live in Gary, Indiana, and categories for people with different levels of paraplegia.
The fact that roughly half of people are men and half are women causes the open category to often be referred to as the "men's" category, but it is not. If a woman can and wants to compete in the "men's" category, she should. If this results in a crowding out of men in the rankings of some sport, they should feel free to start an actual restrictive men's category for that sport. Men's and women's bodies, socialization, and opportunities to practice are different. Men are 50% of the population and deserve their own champions.
edit: there's speculation about women eventually crowding out men in ultra-marathons. Then there would be a good reason for a men's category.
As part of this policy, World Boxing will operate two categories as determined by sex: a men’s category and a women’s category. To be eligible for the men’s category, a competitor must be male at birth. To be eligible for the women’s category, a competitor must be female at birth. [0]
> edit: there's speculation about women eventually crowding out men in ultra-marathons. Then there would be a good reason for a men's category.
I don't think so. No one cares about male competitors who aren't the best of the best.
[0] https://worldboxing.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/World-Box...
They do? Epstein totally did that. Thiel totally does that. All those deeply conservative male leaders do that.
Why would anyone think that having significantly less than 50% women requires no investigation if they didn't think women are intrinsically bad for a company? The problem isn't a skew in favour of women. If you expect 50-50 and get 30-70, obviously that's something to look into, but you're complaining there aren't people trying to increase the skew further. It's like complaining about the lack of organisations explicitly calling to raise the growth in average temperature as a counterweight to all those who want to lower it, or about the lack of charities promoting deforestation.
And yet somehow he - a man - is in jail. A jail built by men, condemned by a justice system designed by men to lock bad men up.
The more you look like a high-status leader, the longer it will take, and the more likely it arrives as a fine or a suspended sentence followed by an eventual redemption story published in the New Yorker or equivalent.
But targeting other high-status people ejects you from the white glove treatment.
In fact, in that exact case the chap who did it was treated far too leniently by the justice system and they've un-"Progressived" the law in some ways to make it so he would never be able to do that again. Which is progress. Or at least the undoing of Progress.
He died in 2021.
Curiously enough, unless something changed and nobody updated his Wikipedia page, his family didnt even collect his ashes.
This sort of thing is really hard to avoid. If you've ever spent time as somehow very different in a social setting, you can see this happening all the time. Even in positive ways.