> Specifically with investors, how are you going to legislate against how someone feels about investing their own money? If they don't want to invest in a woman

> Specifically with investors, how are you going to legislate against how someone feels about investing their own money? If they don't want to invest in a woman company, it's their right. I have the same intuition, but I'm not sure why. After all, you might have said the same thing about an employer who doesn't want to spend his own money on a woman's salary, etc. (And, of course, many have.) But that hasn't stopped us from passing and enforcing employment discrimination laws. I think that focusing on the investor's right to spend his money as he pleases is not the most fruitful way of analyzing the problem. It is undisputed that he has that "right," but history has illustrated that this right can/should be made to yield to overriding social ills. Does the situation of female tech founders compare to the broader problem of employment discrimination? My tentative answer is that it does in terms of pervasiveness, but may not have such a widespread and pernicious effect on the lives of all women that we should be comfortable interfering in private investment decisions in order to combat it.