4 ms·

Sadly, there is almost never any meaningful discussion or analysis of the role her gender likely played in this mess. I made a stab at talking about it only ver

Sadly, there is almost never any meaningful discussion or analysis of the role her gender likely played in this mess. I made a stab at talking about it only very seldom and it generally didn't get well received nor taken seriously as any kind of valid point of view, even though my interest is as a woman trying to sort out how you actually find your path forward.

yuy910616 5y ago
It's almost taboo to feel bad for her! I think she committed a crime - but compare to the coverage to, for example, Madoff, it certainly seems rather different. I guess it cuts both ways - she certainly garnered more attention than your average unicorn startup CEO. Now those same forces are working against her.
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  I don't feel bad for her and I'm not talking about "Poor baby! Men are such meanie faces!" Links to things I dared to open my mouth and say in the past: Me commenting on how I think her gender impacted things: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11450442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11450442 Me commenting on my frustration at the amount of press the debacle got: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14143057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14143057
  - oivey 5y ago
    Your first comment suggests that she merely wasn't getting good criticism because men were fawning over her, and that's why her technology didn't work. We'll see the verdict from the trial, but at this point it is pretty solidly documented that the technology and company she built around it were a deliberate fraud. It seems rather cut and dry. Your second comment (double quoted here to emphasize that it's a quote you made up) says ""Yup, that's what happens when a woman is in charge of a business"" which I would also describe as a pretty extreme mischaracterization of the reaction to her behavior.
    - DoreenMichele 5y ago
      Thank you for engaging me. My first comment was carefully worded to try to avoid drama and isn't a full expression of my thinking. A more accurate statement would be that I think you likely wouldn't have seen a company that was nothing but hot air reach a valuation of $10 billion with a man in charge. Someone would have gone "Hold up. Where is the evidence?" a lot sooner. My second comment was me expressing my concerns about public opinion and how it gets shaped. It wasn't characterizing how she ran the company at all. A lot of stuff gets understood as subtext or due to context. I expressed my feelings and fears and there was strong pushback against that which seems also rather rooted in bias to me. A woman feeling like "God, this looks really bad and I fear how it will impact general perception of women in business." really shouldn't be any kind of drama at all. Yet it was. Edit: Excerpt from a blog post I wrote at the time expanding on my thoughts on my first comment: I feel this is a very widespread issue and a very serious issue. For most women, like me, it holds us back and we struggle to get anywhere. The lack of constructive friction means we just cannot get traction at all. For Ms. Holmes, a confluence of events caused that lack of friction to grow a pipe dream, a fantasy, to incredible proportions due to a lack of brakes in the system. There was a lack of genuine checks and balances. Now, reality is finally intruding and it is a debacle. It is too late to help Ms. Holmes. She just has to pay the piper now. She may never be taken seriously. But I wish this disaster would foster more constructive discussion about the very real problems female founders face.
      - oivey 5y ago
        Madoff's "investment" firm, I think, is a good comparison for Holmes's Theranos. They're both conartists that peddled their image and influence to run fake businesses and steal money from investors. My pre-edit post had a sentence that was poorly written, and it still might be unclear. My point was meant to be that the coverage of Holmes has very much not described the situation as what happens when a woman is in charge. I also think you're not accurately portraying what she has done. She is not some misguided founder who came up with an idea that failed but then just continued to fail up because men were too enamored with her to tell her the truth. She deliberately and repeatedly committed fraud - a crime. She knew her product didn't work, and she went through great efforts to lie about it. The greater context is even more damning when you consider the influence peddling, Jobs costume, fake deep voice, etc. I think the pushback you saw is because your point is ignoring the reality of Holmes's actions to make a separate point. In no way is Holmes a victim of a lack of constructive feedback. I can also understand how it could be concerning that all women leaders will get painted with the same brush as her, but I think virtually all serious coverage of Theranos has described her as an exceptional criminal, not a portrait of women in leadership.
  - tsol 5y ago
    I think there are interesting ways in which gender affects this particular case, though I wouldn't say it dominates. Which is to say, I can see a man doing the same thing, although they would obviously have to adapt a different strategy. Regardless I think a lot of people are afraid to converse in this territory at all lest they get caught up in a wave of anti or pro women downvoters. Additionally I think a lot of people on HN tend to avoid polemic social discussions, because they don't want to risk saying something bad about something they are in agreement with. My observation is that she is a pretty blonde white woman, and I wonder how much harder it would be for a large black woman or a short Indian woman with an accent to accomplish the same thing. It wouldn't surprise most people to hear there may have been some favoritism involved, especially now that she's been revealed as a fraud. The truth is some people are just favored in society and others aren't. I wish it weren't so, I'm certainly not in the favored group, but I can't help but run into that observation in different realms of life. Attractive people tend to get better jobs, more romantic interest, and even babies prefer looking at attractive faces more. But to say everything she accomplished is because she was a woman is.. well a gross oversimplification. She must have been talented just by virtue of the fact that she was able to create as large a fraud as she did. In trying to avoid sounding like they're simplifying her down to just her looks,I think a lot of people may just avoid conversion instead of trying to create a carefully crafted argument one way or the other. I wonder if even what I wrote won't come off the wrong way. But to me, she employed both her intelligence and her looks in order to get her objective(the latter specifically at least in her affair).
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > It's almost taboo to feel bad for her! I think she committed a crime - but compare to the coverage to, for example, Madoff, it certainly seems rather different. Yes, she's gotten massively more sympathetic coverage than Madoff.
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
She was parading around as a lean forward messiah after the allegations came out and the media was lapping it all up without question. A pretty clear example of the women are wonderful effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women-are-wonderful_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women-are-wonderful_effect
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  I think the charitable interpretation is she's seriously deluded. She also "launched" a Twitter hashtag if I recall correctly of #IronSisters which had me rolling my eyes. She was trying to evoke Iron Lady a la Margaret Thatcher but it sounds skeevily like iron maiden instead. Edit: I don't mean the band. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_maiden https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_maiden
legitster 5y ago
If you read Bad Blood, there are some segments that cover the role her gender played. For a couple of the key initial investors, they were clearly willing to look the other way and give her a pass on certain behaviors because they wanted her to be successful. George Shultz also saw her as a certain sort of daughter figure and went out of his way to protect her against accusations of fraud. She also emulated the mannerisms and speech patterns of male peers when presenting herself. Personally, I don't much care for bringing it up too much. No one discusses the role gender played in Madoff's ponzi scheme because it wasn't really relevant to the case. It seems an unfair double standard to bring it up when a woman is accused of it.
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  She slept with a male investor. I don't think I dared voice my suspicions beforehand but was distinctly unsurprised when that detail came out. Men being able to hype their bullshit (edit: I mean outright fraudulent business plans) because they garnered backers via the casting couch isn't typical as far as I know. So I think her gender is pertinent and as a woman I have spent a lot of time trying to sort out how one gets taken seriously for your work. And people finding it rude or something for me to want to discuss that are people essentially telling me "We can't let you figure out how to succeed because your interest in figuring that out is excessively gauche. So just stay poor and continue to go hungry. It sucks to be you and you aren't allowed to aspire to having it not suck."
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    Not only did she sleep with them, but also said that he manipulated her to commit fraud playing the role of a victim of abuse. It was even made public that she formulated her victim defense strategy. It may work to an extent but imagine a male trying to say that they were victimized into commiting a crime.

yuy910616 5y ago

It's almost taboo to feel bad for her! I think she committed a crime - but compare to the coverage to, for example, Madoff, it certainly seems rather different. I guess it cuts both ways - she certainly garnered more attention than your average unicorn startup CEO. Now those same forces are working against her.

DoreenMichele 5y ago
I don't feel bad for her and I'm not talking about "Poor baby! Men are such meanie faces!" Links to things I dared to open my mouth and say in the past: Me commenting on how I think her gender impacted things: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11450442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11450442 Me commenting on my frustration at the amount of press the debacle got: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14143057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14143057
- oivey 5y ago
  Your first comment suggests that she merely wasn't getting good criticism because men were fawning over her, and that's why her technology didn't work. We'll see the verdict from the trial, but at this point it is pretty solidly documented that the technology and company she built around it were a deliberate fraud. It seems rather cut and dry. Your second comment (double quoted here to emphasize that it's a quote you made up) says ""Yup, that's what happens when a woman is in charge of a business"" which I would also describe as a pretty extreme mischaracterization of the reaction to her behavior.
  - DoreenMichele 5y ago
    Thank you for engaging me. My first comment was carefully worded to try to avoid drama and isn't a full expression of my thinking. A more accurate statement would be that I think you likely wouldn't have seen a company that was nothing but hot air reach a valuation of $10 billion with a man in charge. Someone would have gone "Hold up. Where is the evidence?" a lot sooner. My second comment was me expressing my concerns about public opinion and how it gets shaped. It wasn't characterizing how she ran the company at all. A lot of stuff gets understood as subtext or due to context. I expressed my feelings and fears and there was strong pushback against that which seems also rather rooted in bias to me. A woman feeling like "God, this looks really bad and I fear how it will impact general perception of women in business." really shouldn't be any kind of drama at all. Yet it was. Edit: Excerpt from a blog post I wrote at the time expanding on my thoughts on my first comment: I feel this is a very widespread issue and a very serious issue. For most women, like me, it holds us back and we struggle to get anywhere. The lack of constructive friction means we just cannot get traction at all. For Ms. Holmes, a confluence of events caused that lack of friction to grow a pipe dream, a fantasy, to incredible proportions due to a lack of brakes in the system. There was a lack of genuine checks and balances. Now, reality is finally intruding and it is a debacle. It is too late to help Ms. Holmes. She just has to pay the piper now. She may never be taken seriously. But I wish this disaster would foster more constructive discussion about the very real problems female founders face.
    - oivey 5y ago
      Madoff's "investment" firm, I think, is a good comparison for Holmes's Theranos. They're both conartists that peddled their image and influence to run fake businesses and steal money from investors. My pre-edit post had a sentence that was poorly written, and it still might be unclear. My point was meant to be that the coverage of Holmes has very much not described the situation as what happens when a woman is in charge. I also think you're not accurately portraying what she has done. She is not some misguided founder who came up with an idea that failed but then just continued to fail up because men were too enamored with her to tell her the truth. She deliberately and repeatedly committed fraud - a crime. She knew her product didn't work, and she went through great efforts to lie about it. The greater context is even more damning when you consider the influence peddling, Jobs costume, fake deep voice, etc. I think the pushback you saw is because your point is ignoring the reality of Holmes's actions to make a separate point. In no way is Holmes a victim of a lack of constructive feedback. I can also understand how it could be concerning that all women leaders will get painted with the same brush as her, but I think virtually all serious coverage of Theranos has described her as an exceptional criminal, not a portrait of women in leadership.
- tsol 5y ago
  I think there are interesting ways in which gender affects this particular case, though I wouldn't say it dominates. Which is to say, I can see a man doing the same thing, although they would obviously have to adapt a different strategy. Regardless I think a lot of people are afraid to converse in this territory at all lest they get caught up in a wave of anti or pro women downvoters. Additionally I think a lot of people on HN tend to avoid polemic social discussions, because they don't want to risk saying something bad about something they are in agreement with. My observation is that she is a pretty blonde white woman, and I wonder how much harder it would be for a large black woman or a short Indian woman with an accent to accomplish the same thing. It wouldn't surprise most people to hear there may have been some favoritism involved, especially now that she's been revealed as a fraud. The truth is some people are just favored in society and others aren't. I wish it weren't so, I'm certainly not in the favored group, but I can't help but run into that observation in different realms of life. Attractive people tend to get better jobs, more romantic interest, and even babies prefer looking at attractive faces more. But to say everything she accomplished is because she was a woman is.. well a gross oversimplification. She must have been talented just by virtue of the fact that she was able to create as large a fraud as she did. In trying to avoid sounding like they're simplifying her down to just her looks,I think a lot of people may just avoid conversion instead of trying to create a carefully crafted argument one way or the other. I wonder if even what I wrote won't come off the wrong way. But to me, she employed both her intelligence and her looks in order to get her objective(the latter specifically at least in her affair).
dragonwriter 5y ago
> It's almost taboo to feel bad for her! I think she committed a crime - but compare to the coverage to, for example, Madoff, it certainly seems rather different. Yes, she's gotten massively more sympathetic coverage than Madoff.

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago

She was parading around as a lean forward messiah after the allegations came out and the media was lapping it all up without question. A pretty clear example of the women are wonderful effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women-are-wonderful_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women-are-wonderful_effect

DoreenMichele 5y ago
I think the charitable interpretation is she's seriously deluded. She also "launched" a Twitter hashtag if I recall correctly of #IronSisters which had me rolling my eyes. She was trying to evoke Iron Lady a la Margaret Thatcher but it sounds skeevily like iron maiden instead. Edit: I don't mean the band. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_maiden https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_maiden

legitster 5y ago

If you read Bad Blood, there are some segments that cover the role her gender played. For a couple of the key initial investors, they were clearly willing to look the other way and give her a pass on certain behaviors because they wanted her to be successful. George Shultz also saw her as a certain sort of daughter figure and went out of his way to protect her against accusations of fraud. She also emulated the mannerisms and speech patterns of male peers when presenting herself. Personally, I don't much care for bringing it up too much. No one discusses the role gender played in Madoff's ponzi scheme because it wasn't really relevant to the case. It seems an unfair double standard to bring it up when a woman is accused of it.

DoreenMichele 5y ago
She slept with a male investor. I don't think I dared voice my suspicions beforehand but was distinctly unsurprised when that detail came out. Men being able to hype their bullshit (edit: I mean outright fraudulent business plans) because they garnered backers via the casting couch isn't typical as far as I know. So I think her gender is pertinent and as a woman I have spent a lot of time trying to sort out how one gets taken seriously for your work. And people finding it rude or something for me to want to discuss that are people essentially telling me "We can't let you figure out how to succeed because your interest in figuring that out is excessively gauche. So just stay poor and continue to go hungry. It sucks to be you and you aren't allowed to aspire to having it not suck."
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  Not only did she sleep with them, but also said that he manipulated her to commit fraud playing the role of a victim of abuse. It was even made public that she formulated her victim defense strategy. It may work to an extent but imagine a male trying to say that they were victimized into commiting a crime.