Lady Business: The female-founder conundrum, the male-consequences double standard, and the VC factor

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 116th issue, published December 6, 2020.   
 

What a Difference a Year Makes

Fortune this week published a story that I’ve been working on for a few months—and also for the last year and a half, dating all the way back to my last big project at my last employer. Fifteen months ago, Inc. put a pregnant Audrey Gelman, cofounder and CEO of upscale women’s club The Wing, on the cover of a magazine to celebrate the ascendance of female founders. It was a historic, attention-grabbing image—but it soon took on a much darker significance.

 
One pandemic, one racism reckoning, and one implosion of The Wing later, Gelman has become a much less enviable type of poster child. Like Away’s Steph Korey, Outdoor Voices’ Ty Haney, and Reformation’s Yael Aflalo, the now-former Wing CEO today represents the complicated and somewhat self-created perils for a certain type of entrepreneur, several of whom have been forced out of their companies in the past year:
 

While each ouster has its own twists and turns, there’s a lot that unites these companies and founders. All are fast-growing startups that emphasized feminist or socially driven missions. All have venture capital backing or have been sold to private owners. Most provide consumer-facing products. The vast majority were started by young, wealthy, white, or Asian founders who had become the celebrity faces of their businesses. And—some would argue, most crucially—all were founded by women.

To many in Silicon Valley, the toppling of so many of the industry’s most prominent female founders signals something much bigger and more disconcerting than the usual game of startup musical chairs. “There are very few women leaders who rise to the level where they get press and attention, and at some point, they’re all disappearing,” says Sara Mauskopf, the cofounder and CEO of Winnie, a San Francisco-based childcare platform that has raised $15.5 million. Throw in a slew of other female founders who remain atop their companies but who have faced pointed scrutiny of their management styles and cultures—including the CEOs of skin care startup Glossier, retailer Rent the Runway, dating app Bumble, and lingerie company ThirdLove—and it’s hard not to wonder, as Mauskopf does: “What the heck is going on? And why is this only happening to women?

It depends on what you mean by “this,” as my feature explores. Does “this” mean employee complaints about mismanagement, racism, or other workplace problems? Nope: Sustainable-fashion darling Everlane, run by a male founder-CEO who admitted in June that he has “fallen short of addressing issues of institutional racism,” has been subject to plenty of those. (Six months later, that CEO, Michael Preysman, remains in his job—and somehow landed another $85 million from investors. Who declined to comment.)
 
Does “this” mean negative press coverage? There’s a popular argument in the startup ecosystem that reporters are out to get female founders; that we write unmerited critical stories about “mean girls” but let bad men get off unscrutinized. And, well, that’s just not true.
 
Big publications have written plenty of splashy, critical stories this year about allegations of racial and gender discrimination at male-run startups and larger companies, including Everlane, Carta, Pinterest, and, most recently, Coinbase (which “strenuously denied” some allegations in a recent New York Times article, which reported 23 current and former employees’ accusations of anti-Black treatment at the company).
 
Some of these companies have even been the subject of high-profile lawsuits by former high-ranking female executives, at Carta and at Pinterest. And this past week, public shareholders at the social-media company sued Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann, along with his cofounder and other top executives, for allegedly enabling a "systematic culture, policy, and practice of illegal discrimination on the basis of race and sex." (A company spokesman says that Pinterest's leadership and board "take their fiduciary duties seriously.")
 
Yet neither Silbermann nor any of the other the male founder-CEOs running those companies have lost their jobs. “Female founders 100% deserve to be removed from their posts for horrific behavior, but the fact that there are no repercussions for men who are running these companies is crazy,” Ifeoma Ozoma, a former Pinterest public policy manager whose claims of racism at the company have been widely reported, told me. “I can’t imagine a situation where a woman in Ben’s position would still be there.” 
 
So “this” really comes down to negative consequences, not employee complaints or press coverage. The impossibly-high standards for women leaders in every sector are compounded by the too-lenient standards for (the vastly more numerous) men who still dominate the business world. And, as I wrote more about in a companion article to my magazine feature, those men are enabled by the (also overwhelmingly male) venture capitalists and investors and boards of directors who have the real power to punish, or protect, founders accused of treating employees poorly.
 
“There’s no excuse for workplaces that treat employees unfairly and discriminate, harass, or abuse employees—regardless of who the CEO is,” says Emily Kramer, the former vice president of marketing at fintech startup Carta, who is now suing the company for gender discrimination. (Carta and founder-CEO Henry Ward have disputed her lawsuit’s claims.)
 
“I don't necessarily think that we're being too harsh on women founders and CEOs,” Kramer adds. "I think we're being too lenient on male CEOs." 
 

Lady Bits

--Related: Oh look, another male-run big tech company coming under very public scrutiny for reportedly failing at its commitments to racial and gender equity!
 
--This oral history of Hadestown, the Broadway shutdown, and the understudy whose parents had flown in for his starring debut is, almost too appropriately, a Greek tragedy in microcosm.
 
--TikTok resurfaces one of my favorite facepalm stories, about the male NASA engineers who tried to send Sally Ride to space with several months’ worth of tampons … for six days.  
 
--I’m pleasantly surprised to discover that there will soon be new episodes of The Expanse, the gritty space-opera books-turned-TV series that I’ll now always associate with dreading the pandemic’s onset. I’m even more pleasantly surprised by how well The Expanse’s producers, studio, and cast responded to allegations this summer that one of its four main actors has a long history of sexually harassing and assaulting women and teenage girls. The show’s cast and crew took the allegations seriously; they publicly acknowledged the bravery of the women who came forward; the studio conducted an independent investigation; and now the actor is off the show. (Your move, Bull.)
 
--Speaking of problematic actors, it’s unfortunate that anti-masker Gina Carano is undermining my enjoyment of The Mandalorian and her fun character on it. It would be less frustrating if she didn’t play one of the only women allowed to have a major on-screen role, a complicated past, and potential for character growth in Star Wars. If only Disney had, right at hand, any other popular female characters who also fit that description (Mara Jade), who are already well-established in Star Wars lore (Mara Jade), and who are long, long overdue for their own TV show (Mara Jade)!
 
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