Last week Marc Andreessen tweeted about how the press aggressively targets female founders.
Female entrepreneurs are accused of getting into cat-fights, of not being feminist enough, being hyper-critical, cruel, mercurial, inexperienced, and of “going too far” when pivoting their business.
This article from Mother Jones seems to really relish tearing down female founders as a whole group, asking
How are female founders still fucking up this badly? The primary villains, invariably white and privileged, are always the same. Her slick businesses are often underpinned by young employees who say they’ve been subjected to various forms of abuse, including racism and wage theft. But the bosses don’t see any of it—and how could they? They’re preoccupied, staring at each other.
That fixed gaze—and failure to learn from the various exposés uncovering exploitation and embarrassingly spoiled behavior—has become a propulsive distraction.
People disagree with their bosses all the time. Startups can be rewarding and exciting places, but the high-pressured environment doesn’t suit everyone. This is no secret. Founders are a disproportionately privileged group of people. There is no question about that either.
But for some reason it is so much worse for a female founder to be white or to have wealthy parents. As if, by paving the way for one form of diversity, she is expected to represent every intersection of society. Male founders can micromanage their businesses, accidentally tank their company’s stock price, and hire entire departments full of male software engineers. Female founders, on the other hand, have to be perfect.
Take Emily Weiss, the founder of Glossier, who was accused of being too intense because she wanted sign-off on every employee. This was a problem, allegedly, because she did this in areas that were outside of her expertise. I find it difficult to believe that a fifty-something male CEO would have his authority questioned if he took similarly firm control of his company. He’d probably have his work-ethic and attention to detail praised.
These criticisms of female founders are tired. We’ve all seen it before, in every industry under the sun. Women aren’t allowed to be anything other than agreeable, pliant, and conciliatory. If they step out of line, then it is inevitable that journalists will come after them.
But might it go deeper? A lot of articles talk about how employees are upset and quitting these female-founded companies, which indicates to me that this time the blame does not sit entirely with the media. It’s starting to sound like people don’t like working for women who are younger than them.
This fits with what I have heard outside of entrepreneurship too. One of my friends said that when she was a junior doctor, she would struggle with nurses and midwives who didn’t want to follow instructions from a woman in her twenties. Even Taylor Swift, after ten years of being one of the world’s most popular musicians, gets snarky comments from the industry questioning whether she really writes her own songs.
People are social and they seek approval from their peers. So if women are endlessly criticised for being assertive or exceptional, then many more will choose to keep quiet and achieve less. If women receive a tirade of public abuse whenever they build something big, is it any wonder that they are still less likely to found businesses?
I don’t have a good solution to this. There have been plenty of campaigns trying to encourage women to be leaders. Lean In and Ban Bossy don’t seem to have shifted the dial, mostly they just attract jibes on the internet. The same goes for even superficial changes to old narratives, like Emma Watson portraying a feminist-inventor Belle in the Beauty and the Beast remake. It feels like we’re swimming upstream.
My solution right now is to highlight incidences of sexism as and when I see them. But what I really want is deep cultural change - which is not something I can do alone. I want everyone to change how they talk about successful women, and I want these changes to take place throughout our culture; from each individual parent up to the most influential media moghuls.
This sounds like it could be an impossible task, but we’ve been moving incrementally in the right direction, so it’s not hopeless.