How to be taken seriously as a female founder?

@thepaintedbeat A lot of it is innocent prejudice. I’m not saying it’s right I’m just saying they have no Ill will towards you. No malicious intent they are just uninformed. Just like when my wife is telling me a story about a nurse helping her out i automatically see a woman nurse in my head. And like 90%+ nurses are women. I’ve only met a handful of female developers so when someone tells me about a developer I automatically picture a male in my head.
 
@thepaintedbeat I've been dealing with the same for quite a few years - the only thing that gets better is reveling in their reaction to my responses "Yes, that would be me, the CEO (or CTO) of the company" "I'm not the assistant, I'm the owner" "Well, I guess I could put my dog on the phone as he is the only one who tells me what to do since it's my company" and my personal favorite, calling them out on it (very matter of factly) and giving them a chance to step up or I walk away.

You don't have to change who you are, choose your herd and find your people - I promise they are out there.
 
@thepaintedbeat What are the calls about? Investment? parternships? sales?

As a male, dad of 3 girls, I hear about this all to much.

The number 2 and 3 in my own company are females. They can run circles around most men. But they too face some people who will only want to speak to me, and its not because i'm the boss... Slowly they get to a point where the person realizes they probably know more than they do but it takes time.

Maybe it has to do with the approach in the meeting or the pitch? My VP of sales has made inroads at huge companies that I was never able to do but she does. not. quit. no matter how many times you tell her...
 
@thepaintedbeat I have two ideas about this, as me either working with a woman (owner of an agency), and I'll tell you what I noticed.

First, I think your industry had most of the developers are men, that's why everybody assumes they'll be a developer man (because men by nature are interested in objects) - and just like when you marketing, or digital marketing we assume a woman will show up.

I think it all goes to the perspective you have, you want to force them to take you seriously (this shows insecurity and neediness).

but if you just see it from another perspective "I'm the exception here, finally, they get to work with someone who had integrity" will shift how you see the situation.

You can also own it, on a call say something "I am the one gonna take care of this, finally a woman who's great at development ..."

You can also add "I had one a CEO told me, finally we'll work with someone who pays attention and had integrity" this will indirectly tell them I know you think I'm not good enough, but this person just says that.

Last thing (this is what I noticed from the woman I work with), when we hop on a call with a client, she waits for him to lead the call.

How did she do that?
She pauses to let him start talking. She’s too nice.

When she could just chit chat a little bit, then lead the call, so John the goal of the call is to find things we can help you with, usually, we do this and that and it takes about - this will show them you’re in control, and you know what you’re talking about because that’s shat matter.

The last thing, for someone to take you seriously he has to respect you - you don’t force it, or ask for you. You earn it through your actions.

I hope I helped you.
 
@thepaintedbeat TBH - I was called out for being "too personable" for a CTO as a male as well.

And I will be honest, my skillset as a leader in tech rather than pure technical knowledge (even though I have a CS degree), is better than my low level tech communication.

Tech people like me because I can speak their language. Vendors and clients think I am too good at sales and public speaking to be good at technical level.

I can't imagine being in my situation as a woman. Sorry, I don't have advice since I am guy, but (here it is anyway...) anyone with any experience in development will know that a sex doesn't do anything other than prove that you have made it this far going against the grain, so it should be a bonus instead of a negative. The other thing, is that if they were thinking at a business level, having a female CTO or CEO is a big marketing tool.

Basically, it might be making the decision on investors easier. The ignorant ones will ignore you and the smart ones will look past it.

BTW, the old CEO of my current place was a woman who also founded the company a long time ago. Our marketing team uses that as a huge point for client pitches to show how we stand out.
 
@thepaintedbeat so, I'm not denying that bias exists, it definitely does.

I'm going to play devils advocate as someone who has a lot of meetings with clients and execs. I am also, more often than not the other person joining the call. I have 0 experience with startups or how any of that works.

Here's my view on it.
  • Any executive is concerned with the business, internal company, product development, technical etc. you cannot be 100% technical 100% of the time. The executive should be advocating what is best for the company (CTO from a tech perspective, CFO from a financial perspective).
  • An engineer, is going to be 100% technical 100% of the time. They are responsible for knowing the obscure edge cases, different behaviors on different platforms. The "technical person" should only be advocating what is best for the technology.
Here's why I am bought in on calls
  • I know almost every line of code in the code base. I know where things need to be improved, and where the code base will be. Most likely I already have a few fixes and optimizations figured out but haven't gotten to fixing them yet.
  • I listen in just to get a better idea of what the other party is thinking. A lot of very technical details get mentioned in passing that don't really get noticed by people talking about the business side of things.
  • To get an idea of where things may be headed in the future. That way I can make sure the current changes aren't going to cause issues. Also if there's a low priority issue that needs improvement that gets mentioned, maybe I can re-prioritize it and get a head start.
Here's why I ask if anyone else is joining the call
  • There are almost always at least 2 people from each party on a call. One the business person(CTO / Manager), the other is the person in charge of the work (team lead / developer). When I ask the response is almost always either "They couldn't make it, but we can go on" or "yea, but they're running late"
  • I'm trying to gauge the context of the meeting. should I say "cloud" or "kubernetes cluster on aws". Not because he won't understand, but because he'll summarize it to the cloud anyway. Its an indication to me that it should be a higher level discussion.
For the "maybe we could connect with your developers next time" and "ask your tech guy..."
  • They're asking for followup. They're indicating they want another more technical call.
  • Whatever they're asking is important to them, give your high level summary and follow up with more specific technical details.
 
@thepaintedbeat I can identify with your concern. I have been wearing the hat of CTO with 2 startup companies in Real Estate and in IT and I have experienced the same concerns from a male point of view. I believe it's more of an intimidation technique that quite a few people use in Corporate America. I'm tending to trust more in God and not the patterns of this world.
 
@thepaintedbeat Unfortunately, it’s playing it nice and humble, while reassuring them that you’re their point of contact. Normally, I would say “I know I look like a kid, but my soul is older than most!” as a joke to break the ice when meetings get awkward like that. It’s annoying sometimes, but I normally introduce myself within an email linked to my LinkedIn Profile. Majority of the time, they know I run the show after reading my emails.

Most of the time I assume it’s a natural bias created by the nature of our current society.
Another trick is ironically getting an another male to introduce you to the male business contact. For some odd annoying reason, it works the fastest when I ask a male coworker to tell the entire team of other males about my accomplishments… then they acknowledge me all of sudden? Huh? Idk?

Tell me when you find that answer?
Because I’m just as confused as you gurl.
 
@thepaintedbeat Can you describe the tone that means "I want to speak to a man?". On pretty much all my calls it starts with "Is anyone else joining". It's like a polite way to define the start so people don't join mid-sentence. Is it possible it's a misunderstanding?
 
@thepaintedbeat I was on a call with a guy who was asking about my tech stack. And when he was surprised by my not using Postgres, I immediately changed my perspective. I thought this guy was a business guy at first. But as soon as I knew this guy could write SQL, the conversation changed entirely. I knew I could talk about things that business people wouldn't be interested in.

I'm saying this because maybe you should get in the weeds a bit more and talk about the tech?
 
@thepaintedbeat Maybe they've been used to having meeting with more than 1 person? I've definitely asked this before, to all sexes, just wanted to be sure before the meeting starts, especially if email exchanges had been with couple people. I'm used to having several people join meeting from the other side, when someone is pitch me, or when we're pitching software to another company.

Maybe make sure you're talking to the correct person, and set assumptions of what the meeting is about and who is joining.

Honestly, if they ask if a developer can join after the meeting had been sales oriented, they're probably used to dealing with larger teams, where sales and developers are different roles, and developers often don't join non-technical calls. Even if you are the CTO, and it's a specific development or implementation question, they could be used to dealing with a developer advocate or developer who handles enterprise integrations. Large corps, a CTO often won't know the ins and outs of the integration specs.

I wouldn't say definitively this is sexism. I've been dismissed as a male founder when working solo, and dismissed other companies I looked at partnering with when developers seemed flakey.
 
@thepaintedbeat I'm not taking sides or discrediting you, but how can you tell that is what he meant? I meet with executives from different companies all day on online meetings and that is always my first question just to make sure I don't start the meeting until everyone has arrived. I don't have a tone but I definitely don't want to be mistaken as someone that is sexist.

I implement SaaS products and usually, especially with IT, the person that makes the decisions and the person that has the IT skills are different people...and the IT person is almost always late to the meeting.

I'm sorry you went through that though. I wasn't there so I'm not sure how it went, but through my experience I would have asked if there was anyone else joining, meaning nothing other than to be sure everyone that is supposed to be on the meeting is there.
 
@thepaintedbeat Lots of people get dismissed for reasons that have nothing to do with gender, race, etc.

I have an advanced engineering degree and built a startup from scratch and have never even gotten a a call returned when I reached out to VCs. I've attended conferences and events that start off with the announcer stating that they are looking for people other than me and everyone claps. Many grants, venture firms, etc explicitly state that they will give preference to people other than me. It is what it is.

There's a lot going on out there. It's tough all other. I see ideas that get funded that I just laugh at - a lot of them. There are serious issues with the funding process and we all have our own theories as to why that is.

If you feel that people aren't taking you seriously because of your gender, then go to a group, vc, company, etc that specifically caters to founders of your gender.
 
@thepaintedbeat I never got funding, though I still talk to people about it occasionally.

How did I deal with the rejection?

My degrees are in Aerospace engineering and I worked at NASA on the shuttle and in designing some new vehicles. My platform improves the flow for all engineering projects. I realized two things. The first is that engineering - despite the massive market - isn't "sexy".

The second is that VCs are only interested in a few categories of products and anything that isn't in that category isn't even looked at.

I don't take it personally. What I did get bothered by was the number of people/groups that contacted me to tell me that while they weren't interested in my project, they wanted to hire me.

I am routinely astonished at what does get funding. It's all about who you know, not your actual product.
 
@thepaintedbeat It's really unfortunate that, if you are more aggressive and authoritative, you are consider "a bitch". If you're less aggressive, you're overlooked.

I, a white man, am not in a position to truly empathize with your situation. I don't have good advice, sadly. I don't know how to help because this is not a situation that would even be a concern in my day-to-day.

But I will say, there are those of us that don't consider gender, creed, race, orientation, etc. There are people that are interested in the work and only the work. I appreciate knowledge of the topic at hand, nothing else.

I don't know how to find us, but we do exist.
 
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