

Money matters: why women founders struggle in Silicon Valley - itsybaev
http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/6/4067276/money-matters-why-women-founders-struggle-in-silicon-valley

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rachelbythebay
Sometimes I wonder if I should hire a token guy to act as a firewall for
bargaining purposes. Then when it came time to bid for a project, I'd bid X,
and he would bid X+Y as himself, but secretly he'd be working for me. If his
(obviously higher) bids were accepted over mine, it would suck, but at least
I'd get the business. His only job would be to be the figurehead. I'd be doing
all of the magic behind the scenes.

It might be a sobering experiment.

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tawgx
I would love to see more women in "hard" technology startups. There are too
few women founders out there (a sad thing), and out of them a lot work on
companies that appeal mostly to women. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but
I would LOVE to see more women building complex tech startups - evening out
the picture.

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itsybaev
I just can't get why that has become an issue. What's the difference between
male & female founders? Is there any discrimination of the female founders or
not? If not, so why is it harder for the women to get funding?

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travel123
Did you actually read the article? Founders aren't being judged in the same
way, due to their gender.

You see the same thing in academia: give some professional mathematicians some
identical papers, but randomly with male or female names on them, and they'll
rate the ones with male names more highly than their peers who are given an
identical paper with a female name. Unfortunately, both male and female
mathematicians bias their judgement in the same way, so simply having more
female mathematicians (or investors) goes less far than one might think.

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itsybaev
imho, your example is not very good, because VCs don't give funding preferably
to those with male names. According to the article VCs just "can’t see the
world from a woman's perspective". Then the question is why VCs don't hire
more female experts if they "can’t see the world from a woman's perspective".

~~~
travel123
Excerpt from the linked article: \------ At one point, the founder was
introduced via email to the head of a VC firm and got a reply from one of his
associates. “We were given explicit advice that if we were introduced to a
venture partner in a certain way and they passed us off to an associate, we
were supposed to respond with, ‘Thanks so much. I’d love to talk, but I’m
heads down on a product right now and I’m only able to talk to people with
decision-making ability,’” she says. She composed a reply saying as much.
Before sending, she showed it to five different male friends who were also
founders and they thought the tone was fine. But the response she got from the
associate at the firm was shocking. “I got a massive slap on the wrist,” she
says. “The tone of the response I received was, ‘Don’t get too big for your
britches, little girl.’ And it happened a second time as well.” When she
showed the reply to the male founders, they were amazed by the brazenness of
the email. They had never received anything similar in tone and couldn’t
understand why the response was so cold and angry. \------

Another excerpt: \------ Money men look for people who are a younger, better,
smarter version of themselves. It's human nature. The typical funder is an
old, straight, white male, hence the typical fund-receiver is a young,
straight, white, male. \------

There's a hierarchy of (generally unintentional) discrimination. In practice,
there's a lot more discrimination when meeting face-to-face than when just
confronted with names - but even in controlled conditions like the above math
example, there tends to be a massive amount of bias against women in technical
fields. And it's not a matter of perspectives.

