Why I Won’t Be Pitching Any More Female Founders.
I started my business is 2012, over a decade ago. Instagram was embryonic, Uber was still novel, and Tinder excelled at showing us the up close and personal private parts of some of the country’s finest dating options. The media landscape was different then too. Many of our favourite magazines didn’t have online alternatives, female editors were fewer, topics such as menopause, endometriosis and #metoo were not on the front cover. One of the largest changes has been the page space dedicated to Founders. Funding cycles are announced with grinning entrepreneurs perched on the side of their desk, arms folded, their logo emblazoned on their t-shirt, promising fast growth, category disruption, and sector innovation. Many women’s consumer magazines created features to highlight the advancements that women had made in business, featuring a day in their life, top tips, myth busting or features that detailed how these brilliant women had overcome adversity to accomplish incredible things. Their gender was a key factor, given the lack of opportunity in the years that went before.
Over a decade on, and the focus has shifted from the female-ness of a founder, to their business, their ideas and their success. It is no longer a novelty or a reason to feature a company, because a woman is in charge. I would suggest that it is a good thing that the focus no longer hinges on gender, because it would consider that being an entrepreneur is a genderless pursuit. Women-led businesses contributed £3.51bn to the UK economy and created 77,000 jobs in 2015, according to a study by Royal Bank of Scotland. That’s seven years ago.
We are a people who love extremes — that’s why we have a celebrity culture, that’s why reality TV exists, and that’s why huge investment numbers or business value remains a key indicator for media as to whether they choose to write about a company. Naturally, the larger success stories garner more column inches, whether that be money raised, overcoming the odds, product innovation or scandal.
I find it patronising that I would need to lead the communications of the brilliant entrepreneurs I work with, stating their gender, particularly when I have never had to remark about the maleness of a founder. In fact, the etymology of entrepreneur is genderless, denoting a person who undertakes a project, from the French, ‘to undertake.’
The narrative surrounding women in business in general is, at best, counter productive and at worst, regressive and patronising. The recent coverage that cites “socalled girlboss” Emily Weiss as “ending the archetype” by stepping aside as CEO in her generation defining, billion dollar company, is so profoundly flammable, it’s no wonder men and women online have exploded with outrage.
I have always railed vehemently against the #girlboss narrative. I think it is lethargic, stubborn and counter productive, whilst simultaneously resigning women in business as ladies who lunch. It grossly undermines the reality of running a business and engorges the gap between reality and perception. The idea that men are made for business and women are just ‘having a go’ does nothing to level the playing field. During the pandemic, four of my clients sadly went bust. They were all founded or run by men. This wasn’t top of the editorial meeting agenda for that week.
We operate in a call out culture, something that was much less prominent a decade ago. Female take-downs are unhelpful as they highlight the double standard that exists, they cause unnecessary rivalry and secrecy between women in business, and they ultimately creative negative spin, often out of context. Not least prompting tokenism. Scarcity is a symptom of the patriarchy, and perceptions of lack of opportunity that fuels negative female competitiveness are hijacked and magnified.
It’s important not to sideline female success in a bid to align it with the success of men. Whitney Wolf IPO’ing a business for over 8 billion, is an extraordinary achievement. Ringing the bell in your early thirties with a child on your hip, sends a great message to ambitious women; it is possible. In my conversations with both men and women regarding the above news, many remarked ‘but she had a rich husband,’ which frankly left me aghast. There are many many women with rich husbands who have been unable to achieve what Whitney has, and the suggestion that somehow her success is less so due to the opportunities she has, sets a dangerous precedent for undermining female success as we take advantage of making the most out of what we have. The sentence should end with ‘what an amazing accomplishment.’ Not continued with a ‘but.’
There is a tension between accountability and honestly here. Many would argue that if you elevate yourself to a public status, leveraging your profile to generate press coverage, highlighting all your wins, growth and success, that you are fair game to be written about when your business experiences harder times. It’s difficult to not lament the obvious double standard that exists here. Overwhelmingly, women have become targets for media slander, delving into unhelpful details about their businesses to facilitate Inflammatory, hyperbolic rhetoric to back up their stories.
I will say, for the avoidance of any uncertainty, that I wholly support unacceptable, disgraceful, illegal, behaviour being called out, forcing accountability and giving entrepreneurs the opportunity to remedy their mistakes, should that be possible. Men have not been completely left out of this narrative. Elon Musk has been ridiculed for his outbursts on social media (although no one seems to bat an eye that he’s become a father for the 8th time..), BrewDog has been called out for a ‘culture of bullying’ and Philip Green has been savaged in the media for a list of behaviours that would treble my word count if I noted them all. The observation stands, that these examples are very different to the female take downs of late. Emily Weiss allegedly ‘leaving New York during the pandemic and wanting employees to keep their desks overly clean.” There is clear disparity here, and the readiness to focus on emotionally charged language to undermine the success of females CEO’s provides an unhelpful precedent.
The narrative has progressed, and historically, there has never been a better time to be a woman in business. Granted, succeeding with a combination of less fortunate factors does prove for an inspirational story, but why are we pursuing a narrative that being a woman is a misfortune?
The explosion of social media, online publications, content sites, podcasts and panels, has meant that there are now more column inches devoted to the founder of the business; we are interested and concerned with the story and the value system of the person behind the business. That has meant that both men and women have come under fire in the last decade.
The standards are different, and life is not fair, but drawing attention to the gender of a founder immediately triggers connotations that do little to dispel those disparities. I have been fortunate to work with brilliant founders in my 14 year career, many are men and many are women. Examples include powerhouses such as Sara Blakeley (Spanx) and Julian Hearn (Huel). They are all tenacious, ambitious, decisive, resilient, considered, empathetic, high achievers. They deal with extremely high levels of stress, managing their own aspirations for their business, with investors expectations, media exposure, hard and fast growth, and market place challenges, amongst other things. They can be short, anxious, nervous and competitive. They are human beings and are susceptible to the same insecurities, temptations, and mistakes, as all of us. The start up culture is scrappy. They learn as they go, they trip, they make mistakes, they have a million different focuses and they are not the only person in the business responsible for the culture; it is the sum of its parts. The expectation is not for every single person to be happy all the time, as hard as that might be to hear. The expectation is to grow the business and lead a team through a myriad of daily, hourly challenges. Joining these cultures does not mean you should expect to be miserable, but there should be some awareness of the reality of what working for a business growing at speed in a competitive market entails. I have repeatedly heard women described differently to men, despite behaving in a similar way. Women who have ‘masculine qualities’ because they are decisive. Women who are bitches, because they fired someone. Women who are cutthroat because they misjudged an internal communication. Conversely I have heard men described as a ‘great businessman’ for the same things.
It is important to highlight progress, and no doubt data surrounding women in business, additional funding, success and culture, are useful measures to demonstrate that the dialogue is moving on, in the right direction. But drawing attention to gender in this instance does nothing to progress the narrative, rather, it draws attention to the idea that women should somehow be treated different due to their femaleness. We are inadvertently focusing attention to a woman’s exceptional presence in the world of business. Linguists and social scientists refer to this as framing. Framing occurs when we draw attention to certain aspects of a situation, issue, or person. We are told what is most important about a subject, so we can interpret complex, ambiguous phenomena more simply. She is the CEO, she is the Founder, she is an entrepreneur. Seemingly innocent choices in language can completely transform how we perceive something. ’Female’ preceding these titles is an irrelevant detail when the focus is on the product, innovation, growth and success of a business. So, we will be pitching our brilliant founders, CEO’s and entrepreneurs as just that, as they are where they are because they are female, not in spite of it.
