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Comment by facepalm | Hacker News Reader

And we all know male founders are always taken serious from the start. No male founder ever had problems convincing their parents that they are on the right track. People the male founder meets are always convinced his startup is the next Google.

Sorry, but I think your observations are just confirmation bias.

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Male founders are never not taken seriously because they are male. That's the difference.

How do you determine that being a woman is the reason for somebody not being taken seriously?

Those are issues stemming from being a founder, and possibly your parents knowing your fall back plan either doesn't exist, or is to move back in with them.

Those are not issues stemming from your identity as a person. Other groups of people, in this case women, have issues where people are utterly dismissive simply because of their membership in that group.

The challenge this adds on top of normal founder challenges is orders of magnitude greater than any challenge added to founder challenges by being yet another white male founder.

That is just an empty claim, though. Is there any indication at all that it is the case?

Maybe some women CEOs feel they are not being taken serious because they are women. But if CEOs in general are not being taken serious until they are successful, how do those women determine that being a woman is the extra reason they are not being taken serious? And how did they get to be CEO in the first place? Somebody has to have believed in them?

People still often directly vocalize their sexism as such. Stating things like 'Its a good idea for a woman'. They probably don't often do it to the person who they are offending face but I have heard it about others and forwarded onto them in the past.

When people you trust inform you that the someone dismissed you for being a woman, then you can know pretty safely. You can keep defending your stance, although at this point I am dismissing you as a probable troll.

I'm sure people who dismiss women exist. But are they significant? People are being dismissed for all sorts of things. Wrong age, wrong taste, wrong education, wrong school, wrong accent, wrong religion and so on and so on. The question is always, are the jerks a significant enough fraction to have an impact. Women are the majority of the population, so they should have a sufficient supply of business partners. Even if all men would say they don't want to work with women, there would still be several billion women to do business with.

I'm a man, and I don't automatically get every job I apply for. I wonder why that is?

I bet fewer men than women get asked "are you here with your boyfriend?" at hackathons, or hear statements like "oh wow, you code??"

Both questions don't indicate a belief that somebody can't hack, just that it is less likely for that person to be a hacker. That doesn't imply anything about skill.

And CEOs are not usually hackers anyway.

Likewise, sexual interest doesn't indicate a low opinion of somebody's skills. Otherwise only stupid people would have sex.

If female CEOs are only taken serious once they are successful, how did they become CEO in the first place?

Sounds more like an opportunity than a handicap to me.

I don't think they mean parents. I think they mean peers, investors and media.

Parents were just an example. HN is full of stories of founders having such issues.

I'm not sure what anyone's parents have to do with anything related to anyone's startup, but if they do, that's a pretty freaking huge red flag right there. :)

Parents are just an obvious example. There are lots of stories of founders having trouble to justify doing a startup.

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