Lady Business: Fundraising while pregnant; Some bittersweet victories

Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 128th issue, published May 23, 2021.
 

‘Get Back Your Body’

It’s been a draining few weeks of funeral travel, eulogy writing, obituary writing, memorial planning, and the other grim logistics of unexpected bereavement during a partially-waning pandemic. But on Wednesday, I had a welcome distraction in the form of moderating a Fortune Most Powerful Women virtual event, which grew out of my magazine feature on female founders last year.

Money and fundraising were a big part of the discussion, which featured Mighty Networks founder and CEO Gina Bianchini; Mos CEO and founder Amira Yahyaoui; and Universal Standard cofounder and chief creative officer Alexandra Waldman (whose cofounder, Polina Veksler, spoke with me for a 2018 Lady Business).

All of these women have beaten the lousy VC odds for female founders and raised outside investment for their startups. And Bianchini, whose company helps creative types build virtual fan communities (and often sell stuff to them), is pretty optimistic about the non-VC financing options increasingly available to entrepreneurs.

But then there was this terribly depressing story:
 

Amira Yahyaoui, a Tunisian human-rights activist who founded and runs the San Francisco financial-aid fintech startup Mos, last year raised $13 million from investors led by Sequoia, and is aiming for “a really big” series B. But Yahyaoui said Wednesday that she’s recently gotten a lot of “very well-intentioned” advice not to pitch investors right now—because she’s pregnant.

“‘Don’t tweet about it. Don’t tell anybody,’” is how Yahyaoui characterized the counsel she got from friends and allies, including other women in Silicon Valley who have gone through fund-raising while pregnant.

“‘Maybe you should just wait until you get back your body,’” some of these allies told Yahyaoui, who concluded that, when it comes to investors: “There is a huge bias.”

I really appreciated Amira sharing this, because it gets at some of the hard-to-report dynamics of doing business while female—and the difficulties of changing them. Because of course the idealistic thing is to hope that after enough women power through pitching while pregnant, they’ll be able to change the minds and erase the biases of the (mostly-male) investors they’re asking for money.

But God, that sounds exhausting. And often futile. So I completely understand why Amira got so much advice from women who had already been through this process, telling her to just try to avoid it entirely. And I hope that by instead choosing to talk about it publicly, she’ll help make it easier for others—without making it harder for herself.
 

Awards Season

 
As I’ve said on social media, it’s been a bittersweet and weird time to have some professional success. But I’m very gratified and honored that my investigation into the problems with breast implants has received two journalism awards, SABEW’s Best in Business award for health/science reporting and a National Headliner Award for magazine news coverage.

It is also, as my colleague Ellen McGirt pointed out, pretty exciting to be one of four Fortune reporters honored by SABEW—all of whom are women; all of whom were edited by women; and all of whom won awards and honors for stories that reported on women and under-represented groups. As Ellen wrote in her Fortune RaceAhead newsletter:
 

Yes, Fortune is an amazing place to work, and sometimes I think we don’t get enough credit for how truly gender-diverse we are and are still becoming. When traditional media award-granting organizations acknowledge the kind of journalism that illuminates the health, well-being, and barriers facing women, families, and underrepresented communities, it feels like a bigger story - and very good news.

Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com