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.
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.
Only by sexists.
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"...
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.