Poor Unfortunate Souls: Female Founders
As a female founder, I will admit that I have not found the tech industry to be as innovative and inspired as it is touted to be. It is rife in sexism, racism and bigotry. Most investor websites claim jargon like “we fund disruptive innovation” “we are outliers” “we fund differently” “we explore new horizons,” however almost every one of them fund the same personality profile saturating the market with problems that are relatable to a singular demographic, or worse with solutions that are superfluous and intangible like VR, AR, the Metaverse. A study revealed that top VCs were nearly 90% male. Seventy-two percent of founders funded by top VCs were white, and a little over a third — 35% — were based in Silicon Valley. Almost 14% were Ivy League-educated. Their mindset is also parochial when it comes to ROI (Return On Investment), which frames the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that scale the companies into exploitative entities at the cost of integrity, accountability, public safety and planetary health.
Fundraising has felt like a game of chicken, where no one actually has conviction to get behind anything or anyone truly different without guarantees. They cluster to deescalate all risk from their portfolio, investing through peer validation instead of clarity of vision. When risk is asphyxiated there is no room for innovation, which means most investor websites are a hollow ruse that first time founders initially fall for. The only individual who is innovative, disruptive and an outlier is the atypical founder who has had to bootstrap a solution because they are profiled as a minority and consequently a risky investment. Truth is, investing in diversity is uncharted territory for majority of VC portfolios. Such founders now have a new derogatory term being used by investors to qualify them, and that disparaging label is “underrepresented,” which still means fulfilling a quota, not securing mainstream support. It is a disillusioning reality many of us have had to wake up to the hard way, by getting neglected, rejected and pummelled in the arena even before we have had the chance to share our product with anyone.
It has been an uphill climb to raise as much as I have and to get this far despite all the unexpected hurdles. However, the more I am cast aside, the more it gives me fuel to push back against a paradigm that is fundamentally flawed. Make no mistake, tech is not a level playing field, particularly where women and women of color are concerned. Most female founders I know and relate to regularly feel like they should just quit because they cannot see any way forward, as there is simply no capital interest in their solution.
I wake up enraged by the injustices women have to face daily, from inequities in capital access, to opportunity oversights, and information asymmetry. Often, it isn’t what is known, rather like an iceberg, what remains a data gap or a blind spot that compromises women in tech daily. The need for accountability toward female founders from the impractically white male dominated tech industry (including institutional investors) is indispensable yet it is not confronted and ameliorated.
Professionally and personally, I am always silently seething against the inherent prejudices that deny women a chance to get to market with the same level of unwavering financial backing as our male counterparts. This is despite the fact that women get to market sooner, are leaner in their operations (because we are expected to bootstrap), and generate more revenue faster. The Boston Consulting Group study conducted on a sample size of 350 companies (258 founded by men, 92 by women) assessed the following: female-run startups generate 78 cents in revenue, while male-run startups only generate 31 cents. Tech, despite lauding its self as data first, rational sector, somehow manages to turn a blind eye to all the data available, and all the data deficits that exist in regards to women. This is because it does not serve the prevailing order to truly account for either.
Layer on the affronts women have to endure by virtue of being our gender. Our efforts are not appraised based on product features, use cases or projections, rather on personhood and gender stereotypes. To be rejected and silenced daily by those who know less but feel the need to assert their hollow knowledge of more, to have to address the foundation of how our take ins occur with VCs instead of simply pitching our effort, takes away energy and time from building and iterating on what we care about. The continuous undercurrent of misogyny from a patriarchal, demeaning culture results in women having to navigate past landmine behaviors and statements from institutional investors that a male counterpart would never have to anticipate or encounter during a pitch meeting or due diligence. It’s awkward. It’s uncomfortable. It’s disappointing. It’s the elephant in the room, that gets swept under the carpet. It’s socially normalized because this industry is male dominated. We are not as evolved a society as we’d like to believe and the SCOTUS decision that curtails women’s rights is not the most backwards thing about our times. One GP, after offering some guidance, lamented to me, “You are so beautiful.” What does that have to do with what I spoke about in the past hour? Cringe worthy conduct that is utterly unacceptable.
For the record, if you as an investor have to talk over me and remark: “hope Asher wasn’t offended by my statement,” to your male colleagues on Zoom, then use that same neuron to discern it was entirely offensive. It is offensive to be on the receiving end of condescending remarks, mansplaining, inappropriate innuendos, flirtatious advances, irrelevant tangents that objectify, (from old, anachronistic, pompous, white, male GPs), and dismissive apathy from self-acclaimed domain experts in this sector.
I once had a GP explain blockchain to me, when my company is built on blockchain. His assumption was that I knew nothing, he did not even think to ask, it rarely occurs to most men to have the humility to ask. Even when my content and insights are received, I am not given the benefit of the doubt. Male investors seldom address me with the respect my male counterparts receive from the instant they walk through the door. I obviously have domain expertise if not I wouldn't be spending all my waking hours grinding away on this effort. Of course I have researched my landscape, market comps and know why I feel called to this white space, yet that is not what they see when I walk through the door. They see a woman, which for reasons beyond me is associated with liability more than triumph. I am rarely even asked to explain the obvious, more often than not the obvious is explained to me even before I have gotten a word in. Then they are surprised to see that I know more than they pretended to. This dynamic paints me a shade of infuriated crimson. For instance, another investor had the audacity to explain to me what a “board” was. I am on three disparate boards, One Green Thing, Wildlife Direct and on the Advisory Board of Plastic Pollution Coalition. He didn’t think to ask me. He felt he needed to explain. His wife interjected, “I’m sure she knows what a board is, Asher don’t you want to say something?” I said, “His ego is presently occupying all three seats at this table, I am waiting for him to wear himself out and return to his own spot.” Naturally that relationship did not develop, but who wants such toxic masculinity to invest in their undertaking anyway?
It may be easier to talk down to that which threatens you rather than to show up willing and vulnerable to engage symbiotically. I watch as they fluff up their fragile egos at my expense. I would care to know how many men get asked such humiliating questions. After all how could I know anything, I’m a woman. Put me on a shelf, I have no use case on this planet aside of being a conduit for pleasure for an ignorant man’s vanity and hubris.
More often than not, these transgressions occur as a consequence of male arrogance and ignorance, but there are plenty of women who have raised, launched and/or joined funds that make it no easier for female founders to find timely support for their products. To the contrary many women who have found a way into the “man’s world” then make it their life priority to enforce the draw bridge mentality. They begin to fall in love with the narrative of being the special exception that cut through the noise, they do not wish to open up more seats to yet more women. The patriarchy has such a choke hold on women, that even the women who “make it” can only feel a sense of acceptance and belonging if they too emulate the male centrism that perpetuate the gender chasm that ensures women remain unaccounted for.
My anger toward the odds stacked against women is further fueled by the recent SCOTUS ruling that directly deprives countless women across the nation of safe access to abortions and consequently endanger their lives. When did a matter of health care, human rights and bodily autonomy become available for external consensus? A cadaver has greater jurisdiction over what happens to its organs than a living breathing woman does, I would have more agency dead than alive. It’s laughable. How incredulous that men would strive to continue to oppress, violate and enslave women and female fertility in the 21st century! Like we needed more things to go in our disfavour?
Realities that drive me up the wall:
The Harvard Study that discerned women pitching the same content as men failed to receive funding for their product/project. That a man being attractive bodes in his favor, but a women being attractive invariably failed to curry favor and often elicited misogynistic oversight . Male entrepreneurs are 60% more likely to win pitch competitions compared to women.
In 2021 the male co-founder team at Robinhood raised more capital ($3.4B) in its latest funding round than all women-led startups did in 2020 combined. To put that in perspective VC funds raised by all US startups in 2020 totaled $143B VC, yet VC Funds that got allocated to female-led startups in 2020 was a paltry $3.2B (2.3%) There has been a rise in female investors from 9.65% in 2018 to 13% in 2022, yet the number of women led startups receiving funding fell from 2.2% in 2018 to 2.1% by 2022. The math being inverse proportion on that isn’t a sign of progress for women. Women striving to ascend in sectors that were traditionally deemed a man’s world begin to emulate the same stodgy biases that deny fellow women, and other gender, ethnic and racial minorities a key voice and stake in the arena.
Mckinsey 2015 projected that creating gender equality would catalyze women driven and women led economies which is a 12 Trillion market opportunity. This is currently tragically unrealized, which is utterly unreasonable.
An independent study revealed that during due diligence women get asked prevention-focused questions (justify choices, avert losses and thwart negative outcomes) while their male counterparts get asked promotion focused questions (to upsell the effort, share projections and what more they can accomplish with additional support). Naturally the latter sets the stage for significantly higher amounts of funding to be raised.
It’s one thing to have to intentionally bootstrap because the opportunity cost of allocating productive resources toward acknowledging and combating prevailing biases that prevent women from capital access at every turn is concluded as a moot effort, it’s another to be overlooked and asked to justify the capital raise one absolutely needs to build, launch a product with integrity and scale it, simply because you are a woman. Both scenarios are equally heinous, but the former makes it seem like we took the high road, when in truth we had no other way open to us.
Suggestion: If you have not read Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart and Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez then I highly recommend adding them to your reading lists.
Female entrepreneurs are so busy fighting the odds stacked against us, the micro-aggressions, the condescension, the mansplaining, the lack of capital access, the need to justify when we should be given the floor to upsell, the showing up only to be overlooked, the reprehensible disrespect, the inappropriate compliments, the speaking only to not be heard, the being parroted by a man who then gets credit for your idea.
The fact we fight so hard to occupy the space we each have domain expertise in and to have to pave the way forward from, brick by brick, where we not only have to carry our own bricks, we have often had to re-engineer to fit our hand dimensions first. So what is the Age of Accountability without women asking for it?
Successful women are still the exception, it is not the norm. So long as access allocations and acclaim are made available solely to hit a quota as an after thought we do not have gender equity.
Age of accountability has everything to do with empowering women. We have long been asking for accountability from systems, products, institutions, our bosses, our partners, particularly ourselves. Most importantly ourselves. Why? Because it is inherent to us to look out for more than ourselves, as a conduit to bearing the next generation, even if we elected not to have our own, we still have the bandwidth to look out for more than just ourselves. We look out for the next generation, perhaps because we are able to give rise to them, it is in our blueprint to care, and to acknowledge that we need to do right by them as they stand to inherit what we leave behind. Our legacy. So what do we stand for? Standing for more than ourselves informs our actionable purpose and agency from a holistic perspective. To be proactively inclusive takes courage, resilience, and perseverance, as often we may have to go against the stream and do what is needed at the cost of what is wanted. We show up, and we hold accountable every stakeholder, especially the short sighted bad eggs that diminish the reserves the next generations stand to inherit from us, because of selfish, skewed, shortsighted agendas.
I once made the argument that the earth is a man, as a Ted Talk at the UC Berkeley, have a listen, because how could we ensure the planet’s future, while diminishing women? After all, the earth is feminine. So either women need to be empowered and enabled proactively to occupy more positions that could alter our current path or we resign to the dystopian future the current exclusive, extractive path places us on. There needs to be more women on boards, investment firms, and startups, now more than ever, because women are realists, who self assess accurately and build solutions that tackle the needs of the tangible world with integrity as a force multiplier for good. It’s time we as a society took a page out of matriarchal societies like elephants, hyenas and naked mole rats.
The world is the way it is, because we turn a blind eye to things that are within sight, which would change with insight. We can no longer ignore the gender gap, because not only is it a social equity transgression, it is also an enormous market opportunity cost to the world.
