All I want for International Women’s Day: No more female founder takedowns

By Leslie Feinzaig

This morning, my timeline and inbox will be bursting with International Women’s Day. Empowerment quotes, eye-popping data, listicles of accomplished women, corporate pledges, and the occasional rage post. It’s hard to look forward to it. I am equally ambivalent about a day that “celebrates” women’s advancement as I am about adding gender to my job title (as in: Female founder! Female VC! Woman in tech! and so on). Like most women, I would much prefer to drop the qualifier and just be the thing and do the job. And I would prefer it if we didn’t need a day to remind everyone that we’re still far from equal.

But I also know that, the numbers being what they are (atrocious) and progress on gender equality going as it is (at a snail’s pace) and my own experiences being what they are (no comment), it’s disingenuous to say we’re all equal here, that we’re living and working in a post-gender society. In fact, the thing I learned by building the Female Founders Alliance (now Graham & Walker) is that the only space where I could truly just be a founder, and not a “female founder,” is one where I was surrounded by other female founders.  

I’ve talked to hundreds of senior women in competitive, male-dominated fields. Inevitably, literally 100% of the time, there comes a moment in a woman’s career when she realizes that she’s having a different professional experience than her male peers because of her gender (mine was the first time I tried to raise venture capital). I know many young women haven’t experienced it yet, but I can tell you, with complete confidence, that it’s not a matter of if, but when. The moment will come when you realize that the modern workplace, in every corner of the economy, is designed to make it spectacularly difficult for a woman to succeed. It’s not so much that there’s a glass ceiling at the end of our journey—it’s that the entire journey is like navigating a glass minefield. 

I don’t write about this because it’s unfair. Life is unfair. Unfair is not why everyone should care about this. The problem is the futility of it. The collective waste of time and ability. The missed opportunity to utilize half the world’s talent, enable upward mobility for huge portions of the population—not just women but whole families—and spark waves of economic growth as a result. Think about that anytime you hear words like “talent shortage” and “brain drain.” We have the talent right here, stuck somewhere inside a glass minefield.

Those women who do break through and achieve a modicum of success, against the odds, inevitably grow a target on their back. Because when a woman succeeds, too many people—including other women—resent her for it. They’ll say she doesn’t deserve her success. She slept her way to the top. She had it easier because she’s a woman. She’s aggressive, emotional, unlikeable, a shrew, a bitch, a horrible boss. And for ambitious female founders of high growth companies, all too often success leads to a takedown.

We all know how it goes. First, there are leaked screenshots of the mean things they said. Followed by tips to the press that are anonymous for “fear of retaliation.” Then come the juicy headlines, followed by a huge public outcry on social media. The founder gets canceled. The board of directors feels backed into a corner. Something must be done. So, the founder agrees to step down from the company she built. And then she disappears from the public eye, leaving a trail of negative online content that her reputation will never really come back from. Takedowns are a tale as old as Hester Prynne. But modern media, social media, and online search have made for very powerful and permanent scarlet letters. 

Nearly every takedown centers on bad bosses. Takedowns aren’t usually investigative pieces about suspected illegal activity—they’re sensationalized exposés of everyday bad business decisions, immature leadership, and poor people management. But these are mistakes that every single founder and leader makes at least once in their career. I dare you to prove otherwise. 

As for difficult workplaces? It’s an open secret that the venture funded space is bursting with them. You cannot have a career in startups without experiencing at least one harrowing stretch. Are bad working conditions justified? Of course not. Are the consequences of being a bad CEO applied evenly across genders? Definitely not. If a man is a horrible boss, he’s just being a “wartime CEO,” i.e., demonstrating leadership. But if it’s a woman— especially one in the public eye—we all know what she can expect when word gets out. 

Do your job, lose your job

While the public spectacle is awful, it’s also not the problem. The problem is how many female founders of high growth organizations lose their jobs for doing their jobs. And after the takedown and stepdown, these women rarely, if ever, get a second chance to build something big. As for men? Their comebacks are supercharged. To wit: Travis Kalanick, who was pushed out of Uber, has since raised $1.3B for his startup, CloudKitchens. Adam Neumann, who was pushed out of Wework, has since raised a $350 million seed round from Andreessen Horowitz for a new, pre-launch, company. I could go on.

Call me a capitalist (I raised a VC fund, so it’s literally in my job title), but I don’t think it’s bad that Kalanick and Neuman got a big second chance. Great entrepreneurs learn from failure—in fact, the entire VC space is built on second chances. Coming back from failure is a uniquely American value; it’s even codified into law via bankruptcy protection. It’s what encourages risk taking, and big risks, compounded, make for a dynamic, innovative economy. It is in no small part why America has been a global leader for so long. Because here, you can make mistakes and come back from them. And if it’s okay to fail big, it’s also okay to aim big. 

Of course, this great American value isn’t applied evenly across the population. Men fail big and come back bigger. Women fail big and it’s career suicide—and women of color face an even higher bar. This means that some of the most talented, audacious, experienced founders may never get a chance to build big again. And that the fear of career suicide haunts every other female founder. Many strive for perfection instead of embracing good enough and moving faster; others end up far more cautious than their male peers. 

I have lost count of how many women of fast growing organizations— startups, public companies, and nonprofits alike—stepped down after a targeted takedown. Steph Korey at Away, Audrey Gelman at The Wing, Ty Haney at Outdoor Voices, Leen Kawas at Athira Pharma, Sophia Amoruso at Nasty Gal, Shannon Spanhake at Cleo, Kimberly Bryant at Black Girls Code, the list goes on. I’d love to see just one of them raise a few hundred million dollars for a new pre-launch company.

I know some of you will insist that these women had it coming. Bad CEO behavior is never justified. Maybe you have the true moral high ground to judge bad bosses, and to cancel Gelman, Kawas, and Bryant, and even cancel me for daring to stand up for them. But when you do, don’t forget to apply that same judgment evenly across the economy, equally punishing every company that’s ever been a bad place for someone to work, has had bad diversity records, cost people jobs, or caused them work-related trauma. The recent mass layoffs are a good start for your cancel list. Stop ordering from Amazon. Stop taking Ubers and Lyfts. Stop Googling. Stop using Word, Powerpoint, and Excel. Stop playing most video games. Cancel your Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, HBO Plus, and Amazon Prime subscriptions. And be sure to close your Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, and WhatsApp accounts, too.

Or, maybe instead we can all give female founders a break. Maybe we stand up for a woman’s right to screw up sometimes. Maybe we recognize that people who take big chances are bound to make big mistakes, and that as a society we have laws to address actions that are outside of what is reasonable. Only when we face equal consequences for our mistakes will women have the privilege to be “brave, not perfect.” To aim high without the constant fear of being shot down. To make the gender qualifier a thing of the past, to stop being female founders, and just be founders with a more equal shot at success. Because humanity at large is better off when we encourage healthy risk taking equally across all types of people—and when we invest in all types of people too. But that’s a topic for another day. 

Leslie Feinzaig is the founder and managing director at Graham & Walker Venture Fund. She can be found on Twitter at @LeslieFeinzaig.

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