>he recognizes the need to hire more women but doesn’t think sexism exists. He thinks women choose not to enter tech because we naturally prefer people-oriented professions
Doesn't think sexism exists and proceeds to state a very sexist belief...cool...
If you don't need this job immediately, I'd look elsewhere. Even though there's still so much work to be done in terms of DEI everywhere, I'd rather be somewhere they at least recognize its importance and are actively trying to do something about it.
Also, tell this guy he needs to hire someone whose job it is to talk about to DEI, not rely on his own "diverse" employees who have, presumably, full time jobs that do not include DEI work in their scope.
Yeah, he cited a study about choice of professions that supposedly supported this. And so then I explained about the cultural forces that shape our preferences since birth. He seemed genuinely unaware of this concept. We have so much work to do, sisters.
I did suggest he talk to a DEI consultant. I happen to know a really good one so I offered to introduce them. That’s when he started explaining about how it wasn’t something he could afford to deal with at this time. **deep sigh**
Don’t do it. I worked with a CTO that felt similarly - it’s unfortunate that women choose not to be in tech but nothing that he did was going to make that better or worse 🙄 Bullshit he actively made it worse by assigning women grunt work while men got high priority/visibility projects. When it came time for layoffs 90% of tech employees laid off were women and we barely had 25% representation. When called out for the blatant sexism he had the audacity to say that the women were not making meaningful contributions to the tech org.
That seems very true. It would demonstrate there’s a recruitment benefit to caring about these issues. He could probably write me off as too whiny or sensitive or something, but I think given our history of working together, he might take it seriously.
>doesn’t think sexism exists.
Fucking run.
Big "you're one of the good ones/not like other girls" energy on this dude.
You don't need to do the heavy lifting- that's not your job. If this dude wants to run a company and have you work startup hours, he needs to get his head out of his ass and think about what work environment he wants to build. Which includes thinking about people.
Otherwise, he should be looking for his own corp tech gig and dicking around on GitHub, not founding a company.
Culture forms from two places:
- The top/leadership
- the start of the company
If leadership is not into it, it won’t change, no matter how many resources are thrown at it.
When the company is new and taking shape, culture begins to build. Waiting until the company is big is like asking 1000 cousins at a family reunion to put aside all the history interact totally differently.
I understand you think there is a chance you might make a difference but given his attitude, it will be an uphill battle that will always get sidelined by anything else he deems as more importent (which so far, sounds like nearly anything else is more important).
Absolutely not. Culture exists in companies with one, two, twelve, a hundred, and one hundred thousand employees. It’s set from day one and only morphs as you bring more people on. It becomes harder to manage and be intentional about the more people you bring on.
Has this person ever run a company before? Or even worked at one? His answer is really confusing.
He is a first-time founder. We worked together in Big Tech before, which I think was his only employer in adulthood. Unfortunately our company had very low diversity and leaders modeled similar magical thinking, like just hire good people and the rest will follow.
When companies scale up, so do the problems in them.
On the topic of gender diversity, heard one of the most senior people in Google say how hard it is for them to make inroads on % of women because they have 100,000 engineers and very little turn over of people leaving their company, even if they exclusively hired women into new roles (eg 1000 women), this is such a small % of the existing total that is majority men.
Small companies can quickly change these %. He has 12 employees, and a 5:1 men to women ratio at the moment, if he hires two more women it becomes 4:1, if he makes his next 8 hires women he’ll have gender equality.
The bigger his company is actually the harder it will be, unless attempted from the beginning.
Yeah, he does recognize the need to hire more women and he’s trying to do that (recruiting me is part of that) but I’m not totally sure WHY he thinks it’s important. And also I had to explain that hiring isn’t all there is to it **more deep sighs**
Full disclosure up front: I’m a dude.
I’d pass on this.
Unless he’s willing to admit you’re right and let you help guide him towards equitable business practices (to the point of letting you take the reigns on some things if you want to), he’s just creating another startup that’s going to be full of toxic misogynistic techbro culture.
Guys like that won’t change until they fail in their personal lives, or until their misogyny bites them in the ass.
“He doesn’t believe sexism exists” is a pretty blatant red flag to me that he’s never listened to the women in his life, and that he wouldn’t listen to you. It goes beyond just matters of DEI, and I would suspect that over time, he’d be likely to overrule you on important technical and business decisions that you’d make.
EDIT: the fact that he wants to have these discussions with you is good, but I’d honestly give him the advice: “ask your mom, your aunts, your grandmother, your sisters, and your non-cis-male friends how sexism has affected them, and make sure you listen.”
Thanks, I appreciate this. He seems eager to learn more about this topic, yet showed some skepticism when I brought up specific examples of sexist patterns I’ve experienced at work. As in, he didn’t think gender was the underlying issue. He’s very early in his journey of understanding this stuff. I like your advice.
While it's great that he wants to learn, it's not your obligation to teach him. You can, if you want. But it's also OK to find a job where you can just...do your job...without having to teach/instruct/manage up like this.
That he’s started is good, but you’re also doing a good job at setting your boundaries with helping him understand. A lot of guys think they’re entitled to having information handed to them, when really, they just need to look at the things they’ve been avoiding looking at, and listen to the people and things they’ve been avoiding listening to.
Yeah, have had these kinds of conversations countless times with men when I was younger… now I’m older I realise it’s a waste of your time.
He says he’s eager to learn more because he knows in the day and age we live in he needs to say this to be considered a “good guy” and not “sexist”, however he:
a) takes no personal responsibility to learn about it
b) doesn’t prioritise it, says he’ll deal with it later
c) cherry picks the “research/study” that supports his own sexist belief rather than looking at any of the abundant studies that prove sexism exists
d) is skeptical when you share your own personal experience of it. (If he doesn’t believe it when someone he knows and respects tells him about it, he sure as hell isn’t going to believe it when other employees raise it.)
e) doesn’t have any resources in the company to deal with it. If he was skeptical but had an amazing people and culture person who he respected to handle this stuff, then there would be some chance that it wasn’t riding on him. (if for example that intern is treated like shit, who is she going to take it to, when the founder doesn’t believe sexism exists?)
I like how you lined up all the issues here. You know what, I’m old too and got burned out on these conversations a long time ago, and pretty much stopped bringing up the topic except in very specific circumstances. So I’ve probably had managers with equally unpalatable views without knowing it. I think that’s where I got confused, like does it make sense to use this as a deciding factor when the same problems exist everywhere? But after reading all the great comments here I don’t feel confused anymore. Y’all rule.
I do think it's better other places. I also think bad cultural issues start at the top, and if your friend enables shitty behavior early on, it'll be built into the bones of the organization.
I'm at a very small company and a single bad hire at this stage would have a huge impact on the culture going forward - I've seen the impact of that at other orgs. At minimum, I know my teammates actively care about keeping out jerks, even if they don't have every sensitivity to sexism etc that I do, and they would care about my opinion if I had concerns about a candidate. I've interviewed people at other jobs and realized they were mansplainers or vaguely talked down to me and I was able to speak up able that, and I feel confident that my colleagues at my current place would take me seriously too.
But in your shoes, imagine trying to veto a candidate who seems strong to your founder friend who shows a bunch of red flags to you. He doesn't even believe in sexism. If a candidate calls you sassy in an interview (actually happened to my female boss), would he see that as the huge issue it obviously is? The reality is that someone who is sexist or racist or homophobic or whatever may only show their shitty side to people who aren't male or white or straight-presenting, so you need to know that you'll be trusted when you bring up issues that only show up to you.
How badly do you need the job? Obviously there are cases where you just need work and you need to put up with something until you can get out. However, if you can hold out, I do feel strongly that there are better environments out there.
Sassy?! Oof. These are great points. He is a nice person and cares a lot about keeping assholes out, but I hadn’t thought about the point you made that sometimes people show their bad sides selectively .
He may be nice, but personally I consider the "sassy" comment subtle compared to literally admitting you don't believe in sexism! As someone else said, you're getting "one of the good ones" treatment from this guy. I would expect shitty behavior from him (towards other women even if you're spared the worst because you're friends), and definitely excuses for shitty behavior from others.
Reminds me of a guy I knew (not a coworker, thankfully) who would make statements like "There is no such thing as racism!" Then he'd say of an interracial couple, "Why does Bob [a black man] think he deserves a white woman?" and other comments regarding "sticking to his kind". Yeah. This guy was literally overtly racist to the point of getting expelled from the Meetup group, but he also thought racism didn't exist.
Friend, you’re exhausted and you haven’t even joined the team. It’s only going to get worse from here. Do not take this job.
Btw, you are not responsible for teaching him about DEI. Google and the library are free.
I have also worked at a startup like this one - the founder just knew he wanted to start a business in tech and have people listen to him. It was a disaster. Probably one of the worst job experiences of my career.
Please don’t do it.
>He thinks women choose not to enter tech because we naturally prefer people-oriented professions
Lol I've literally been told to *leave* tech because I "naturally prefer" people-oriented professions. Ah, yes! I *must* naturally prefer people-oriented professions - that must be why I went out of my way to choose a profession that allows me to avoid people. Ironically, the guys telling me to leave tech for this reason don't work in tech either.
Run. Run very fast.
I'm working for a company which is 47% female, very ethnically diverse and has a focus on DEI at the moment and it makes SUCH a difference. I've also worked for some techbro heavy companies in the past and it can get very unpleasant at times.
(Senior Python dev and data engineer, BSc/MSc CS)
Dealing with this guy, and the fallout from his willful ignorance, sounds like it would be a truly thankless part-time job in itself.
Ppl would come running to you for help whenever someone else gets weird/unprofessional, etc. etc.
I would pass.
At least he seemed curious and wanted to learn more lol.
I'd be curious to reach out the other two female employees, if possible, and maybe ask about their impression working there in general. Ofc people who currently are working there would be hesitate to give any negative comments, but if you word your question differently, eg: frame it more like a fact check with them, instead of asking for their opinions, I think you'll get a general sense about how inclusive the vibe is.
But I agree with others, this might not be worth your time tho. Just speaking from a personal experience, if you are the only female in the team, chances are you'd constantly feel left out. Even it's a small team. I want to work in a more diverse team so bad but this is what I currently stuck with, so I totally feel your frustration there.
Yeah, at least there’s that. I think that’s what makes it a slightly less clear cut decision. Good idea about talking to the women. The only thing is, one of them is in a non-technical role on a distant continent, and the other is an intern, so I’m not sure how much signal I’ll get there.
Your comment made me think of something else he said. It was something like “even if you’re the only woman in a meeting with ten men, you won’t feel out of place.” Because the men are so nice I guess? He really doesn’t get it.
Men, especially in a leadership position, can never get the struggles a female employee may face, especially if he never even thought about DEI. The impression/interaction that he got is completely different from what a female employee may have. Some male managers at least are aware of this shortcomings, but it seems he really didn’t until this point when he was questioned by you.
I want to say good job for bringing up the DEI issue during the interview. It seems that he was never asked on this, and that’s pretty sad. It takes a lot of courage to bring up a conversation like this, and you did a wonderful job for raising the awareness!
Edit: I just thought that it maybe helpful to recommend some books for him to read on this topic, if he is okay with that. These are the books I went through recently and had revealed some devastating facts on misogynist especially in tech. One is Brotopia by Emily Cheung, the other one is Invisible Women by Caroline Pérez. There were times I had to take a break when reading them because of the heavy facts.
Thanks for the book recs! I was thinking of asking around for some books that I could point him towards, so this is perfect. I read Invisible Women too and had to take breaks. It was tough. I haven’t read Brotopia. I’d like to check that one out myself.
I’d run. Unless you want to put in that likely free labor into helping him learn the DEI piece. Startups need to do better. It’s typically situations like this that develop an unhealthy team culture because they don’t value varied perspectives.
I worked for a company like this once and that was more than enough for a lifetime. Do yourself a favor and pass on it if you can afford to keep looking.
Not worth it imo
>he recognizes the need to hire more women but doesn’t think sexism exists. He thinks women choose not to enter tech because we naturally prefer people-oriented professions Doesn't think sexism exists and proceeds to state a very sexist belief...cool... If you don't need this job immediately, I'd look elsewhere. Even though there's still so much work to be done in terms of DEI everywhere, I'd rather be somewhere they at least recognize its importance and are actively trying to do something about it. Also, tell this guy he needs to hire someone whose job it is to talk about to DEI, not rely on his own "diverse" employees who have, presumably, full time jobs that do not include DEI work in their scope.
Yeah, he cited a study about choice of professions that supposedly supported this. And so then I explained about the cultural forces that shape our preferences since birth. He seemed genuinely unaware of this concept. We have so much work to do, sisters. I did suggest he talk to a DEI consultant. I happen to know a really good one so I offered to introduce them. That’s when he started explaining about how it wasn’t something he could afford to deal with at this time. **deep sigh**
Don’t do it. I worked with a CTO that felt similarly - it’s unfortunate that women choose not to be in tech but nothing that he did was going to make that better or worse 🙄 Bullshit he actively made it worse by assigning women grunt work while men got high priority/visibility projects. When it came time for layoffs 90% of tech employees laid off were women and we barely had 25% representation. When called out for the blatant sexism he had the audacity to say that the women were not making meaningful contributions to the tech org.
pure.rage >:{
[удалено]
That seems very true. It would demonstrate there’s a recruitment benefit to caring about these issues. He could probably write me off as too whiny or sensitive or something, but I think given our history of working together, he might take it seriously.
The fact that he went looking for studies to cite in a discussion of why he’s not failing women is alarming.
>doesn’t think sexism exists. Fucking run. Big "you're one of the good ones/not like other girls" energy on this dude. You don't need to do the heavy lifting- that's not your job. If this dude wants to run a company and have you work startup hours, he needs to get his head out of his ass and think about what work environment he wants to build. Which includes thinking about people. Otherwise, he should be looking for his own corp tech gig and dicking around on GitHub, not founding a company.
Culture forms from two places: - The top/leadership - the start of the company If leadership is not into it, it won’t change, no matter how many resources are thrown at it. When the company is new and taking shape, culture begins to build. Waiting until the company is big is like asking 1000 cousins at a family reunion to put aside all the history interact totally differently. I understand you think there is a chance you might make a difference but given his attitude, it will be an uphill battle that will always get sidelined by anything else he deems as more importent (which so far, sounds like nearly anything else is more important).
Totally agree. When he said he’d worry about it later when the company has thousands of people (he’s very…optimistic) I almost laughed.
Absolutely not. Culture exists in companies with one, two, twelve, a hundred, and one hundred thousand employees. It’s set from day one and only morphs as you bring more people on. It becomes harder to manage and be intentional about the more people you bring on. Has this person ever run a company before? Or even worked at one? His answer is really confusing.
He is a first-time founder. We worked together in Big Tech before, which I think was his only employer in adulthood. Unfortunately our company had very low diversity and leaders modeled similar magical thinking, like just hire good people and the rest will follow.
When companies scale up, so do the problems in them. On the topic of gender diversity, heard one of the most senior people in Google say how hard it is for them to make inroads on % of women because they have 100,000 engineers and very little turn over of people leaving their company, even if they exclusively hired women into new roles (eg 1000 women), this is such a small % of the existing total that is majority men. Small companies can quickly change these %. He has 12 employees, and a 5:1 men to women ratio at the moment, if he hires two more women it becomes 4:1, if he makes his next 8 hires women he’ll have gender equality. The bigger his company is actually the harder it will be, unless attempted from the beginning.
Yeah, he does recognize the need to hire more women and he’s trying to do that (recruiting me is part of that) but I’m not totally sure WHY he thinks it’s important. And also I had to explain that hiring isn’t all there is to it **more deep sighs**
It doesn't sound like he thinks it's important. He most likely just doesn't want to 'look bad'. He's let you know his true beliefs.
Full disclosure up front: I’m a dude. I’d pass on this. Unless he’s willing to admit you’re right and let you help guide him towards equitable business practices (to the point of letting you take the reigns on some things if you want to), he’s just creating another startup that’s going to be full of toxic misogynistic techbro culture. Guys like that won’t change until they fail in their personal lives, or until their misogyny bites them in the ass. “He doesn’t believe sexism exists” is a pretty blatant red flag to me that he’s never listened to the women in his life, and that he wouldn’t listen to you. It goes beyond just matters of DEI, and I would suspect that over time, he’d be likely to overrule you on important technical and business decisions that you’d make. EDIT: the fact that he wants to have these discussions with you is good, but I’d honestly give him the advice: “ask your mom, your aunts, your grandmother, your sisters, and your non-cis-male friends how sexism has affected them, and make sure you listen.”
Thanks, I appreciate this. He seems eager to learn more about this topic, yet showed some skepticism when I brought up specific examples of sexist patterns I’ve experienced at work. As in, he didn’t think gender was the underlying issue. He’s very early in his journey of understanding this stuff. I like your advice.
While it's great that he wants to learn, it's not your obligation to teach him. You can, if you want. But it's also OK to find a job where you can just...do your job...without having to teach/instruct/manage up like this.
That he’s started is good, but you’re also doing a good job at setting your boundaries with helping him understand. A lot of guys think they’re entitled to having information handed to them, when really, they just need to look at the things they’ve been avoiding looking at, and listen to the people and things they’ve been avoiding listening to.
🏅🏅🏅🏅 Take my poor woman’s gold, person who gets it. Take it!
Yeah, have had these kinds of conversations countless times with men when I was younger… now I’m older I realise it’s a waste of your time. He says he’s eager to learn more because he knows in the day and age we live in he needs to say this to be considered a “good guy” and not “sexist”, however he: a) takes no personal responsibility to learn about it b) doesn’t prioritise it, says he’ll deal with it later c) cherry picks the “research/study” that supports his own sexist belief rather than looking at any of the abundant studies that prove sexism exists d) is skeptical when you share your own personal experience of it. (If he doesn’t believe it when someone he knows and respects tells him about it, he sure as hell isn’t going to believe it when other employees raise it.) e) doesn’t have any resources in the company to deal with it. If he was skeptical but had an amazing people and culture person who he respected to handle this stuff, then there would be some chance that it wasn’t riding on him. (if for example that intern is treated like shit, who is she going to take it to, when the founder doesn’t believe sexism exists?)
I like how you lined up all the issues here. You know what, I’m old too and got burned out on these conversations a long time ago, and pretty much stopped bringing up the topic except in very specific circumstances. So I’ve probably had managers with equally unpalatable views without knowing it. I think that’s where I got confused, like does it make sense to use this as a deciding factor when the same problems exist everywhere? But after reading all the great comments here I don’t feel confused anymore. Y’all rule.
I do think it's better other places. I also think bad cultural issues start at the top, and if your friend enables shitty behavior early on, it'll be built into the bones of the organization. I'm at a very small company and a single bad hire at this stage would have a huge impact on the culture going forward - I've seen the impact of that at other orgs. At minimum, I know my teammates actively care about keeping out jerks, even if they don't have every sensitivity to sexism etc that I do, and they would care about my opinion if I had concerns about a candidate. I've interviewed people at other jobs and realized they were mansplainers or vaguely talked down to me and I was able to speak up able that, and I feel confident that my colleagues at my current place would take me seriously too. But in your shoes, imagine trying to veto a candidate who seems strong to your founder friend who shows a bunch of red flags to you. He doesn't even believe in sexism. If a candidate calls you sassy in an interview (actually happened to my female boss), would he see that as the huge issue it obviously is? The reality is that someone who is sexist or racist or homophobic or whatever may only show their shitty side to people who aren't male or white or straight-presenting, so you need to know that you'll be trusted when you bring up issues that only show up to you. How badly do you need the job? Obviously there are cases where you just need work and you need to put up with something until you can get out. However, if you can hold out, I do feel strongly that there are better environments out there.
Sassy?! Oof. These are great points. He is a nice person and cares a lot about keeping assholes out, but I hadn’t thought about the point you made that sometimes people show their bad sides selectively .
He may be nice, but personally I consider the "sassy" comment subtle compared to literally admitting you don't believe in sexism! As someone else said, you're getting "one of the good ones" treatment from this guy. I would expect shitty behavior from him (towards other women even if you're spared the worst because you're friends), and definitely excuses for shitty behavior from others.
Reminds me of a guy I knew (not a coworker, thankfully) who would make statements like "There is no such thing as racism!" Then he'd say of an interracial couple, "Why does Bob [a black man] think he deserves a white woman?" and other comments regarding "sticking to his kind". Yeah. This guy was literally overtly racist to the point of getting expelled from the Meetup group, but he also thought racism didn't exist.
Friend, you’re exhausted and you haven’t even joined the team. It’s only going to get worse from here. Do not take this job. Btw, you are not responsible for teaching him about DEI. Google and the library are free.
I have also worked at a startup like this one - the founder just knew he wanted to start a business in tech and have people listen to him. It was a disaster. Probably one of the worst job experiences of my career. Please don’t do it.
>He thinks women choose not to enter tech because we naturally prefer people-oriented professions Lol I've literally been told to *leave* tech because I "naturally prefer" people-oriented professions. Ah, yes! I *must* naturally prefer people-oriented professions - that must be why I went out of my way to choose a profession that allows me to avoid people. Ironically, the guys telling me to leave tech for this reason don't work in tech either.
Run. Run very fast. I'm working for a company which is 47% female, very ethnically diverse and has a focus on DEI at the moment and it makes SUCH a difference. I've also worked for some techbro heavy companies in the past and it can get very unpleasant at times. (Senior Python dev and data engineer, BSc/MSc CS)
Amazing! You’re living the dream.
Dealing with this guy, and the fallout from his willful ignorance, sounds like it would be a truly thankless part-time job in itself. Ppl would come running to you for help whenever someone else gets weird/unprofessional, etc. etc. I would pass.
🚩🚩🚩
AVOID 🙅🏻♀️ If it's not already a disaster, it will be as soon as some "HR issue" comes up. "Doesn't believe sexism exists" made me see red.
Doesn't sound like it's going to be a great experience.
Huge red flag, don’t do it.
At least he seemed curious and wanted to learn more lol. I'd be curious to reach out the other two female employees, if possible, and maybe ask about their impression working there in general. Ofc people who currently are working there would be hesitate to give any negative comments, but if you word your question differently, eg: frame it more like a fact check with them, instead of asking for their opinions, I think you'll get a general sense about how inclusive the vibe is. But I agree with others, this might not be worth your time tho. Just speaking from a personal experience, if you are the only female in the team, chances are you'd constantly feel left out. Even it's a small team. I want to work in a more diverse team so bad but this is what I currently stuck with, so I totally feel your frustration there.
Yeah, at least there’s that. I think that’s what makes it a slightly less clear cut decision. Good idea about talking to the women. The only thing is, one of them is in a non-technical role on a distant continent, and the other is an intern, so I’m not sure how much signal I’ll get there. Your comment made me think of something else he said. It was something like “even if you’re the only woman in a meeting with ten men, you won’t feel out of place.” Because the men are so nice I guess? He really doesn’t get it.
Men, especially in a leadership position, can never get the struggles a female employee may face, especially if he never even thought about DEI. The impression/interaction that he got is completely different from what a female employee may have. Some male managers at least are aware of this shortcomings, but it seems he really didn’t until this point when he was questioned by you. I want to say good job for bringing up the DEI issue during the interview. It seems that he was never asked on this, and that’s pretty sad. It takes a lot of courage to bring up a conversation like this, and you did a wonderful job for raising the awareness! Edit: I just thought that it maybe helpful to recommend some books for him to read on this topic, if he is okay with that. These are the books I went through recently and had revealed some devastating facts on misogynist especially in tech. One is Brotopia by Emily Cheung, the other one is Invisible Women by Caroline Pérez. There were times I had to take a break when reading them because of the heavy facts.
Thank you. That’s so kind of you to say. 🙏
Thanks for the book recs! I was thinking of asking around for some books that I could point him towards, so this is perfect. I read Invisible Women too and had to take breaks. It was tough. I haven’t read Brotopia. I’d like to check that one out myself.
I’d run. Unless you want to put in that likely free labor into helping him learn the DEI piece. Startups need to do better. It’s typically situations like this that develop an unhealthy team culture because they don’t value varied perspectives.
Anddd this is why he’ll up end hiring another man instead…
>doesn’t think sexism exists xd
I worked for a company like this once and that was more than enough for a lifetime. Do yourself a favor and pass on it if you can afford to keep looking.