The Nature of Gender Bias Today

The nature of gender bias today is that you usually can’t prove it in any one particular instance. 

There are definitely provable instances where someone says out loud that they don’t think a woman should be able to do or have this or that. For example, 17% of people polled by YouGov in October 2024 agree with the statement “Women should take care of running their homes and leave running the country up to men,” which is nearly 1 in 5 people. 

Because we’ve made some progress in equality for women, such overt statements are less common now, especially to women’s faces. 

But in so many instances when a woman loses out—in startups, in corporate, in politics—you can’t “prove” that bias against a woman, because she is a woman, was the cause for her to be passed over, mistreated, misjudged, or denied. 

To definitively prove it, you would have to have an exact counterfactual example, where all other factors are exactly the same, but the woman was a man. And that almost never exists, so there is always something else to point to as a factor. “The total addressable market of her startup isn’t big enough,” “Some of her colleagues find her abrasive,” “Her policy ideas were vague,” “We didn’t know much about her.”

Yet when you look back at women’s results and lack of progress in the aggregate, the inequality smacks you in the face. In a world where “equal” would be 50%, and women have graduated from college at greater than 50% for decades, venture funding to women has been at 2% for the last 15 years. Women in CEO, management, and law firm partnership roles remain stubbornly low. Zero female presidents out of 47, though both parties have had serious contenders.

Surely in some of the individual instances when women lost out, an unspoken bias against her affected the outcome. Women tend to suspect it when it happens to them. They see it in the doubt expressed about what they are saying; in the way their statement gets ignored in one moment but repeated by their male colleague in the next moment and praised; in the comparison of her tiniest of flaws with her male competitor’s cornucopia of faults easily forgiven. 

It is almost never helpful for a woman to point out suspected bias in that instant, and in many cases it is actively detrimental. “It wasn’t sexism, it was all these other things!” a chorus of men and women will angrily leap up to say. Someone will probably say exactly that about some specific instance they think I am talking about in the comments to this post (doesn’t have to be you). Pointing out suspected bias creates resentment and backlash, which makes many women just bear it quietly. 

Like I said, you can almost never prove anti-woman bias in a particular instance.  But you also can’t prove it wasn’t some conscious or subconscious, deeply ingrained way of seeing women as less capable and competent than men that caused a woman to lose out on that one investment or deal or promotion or election. 

And given the existence of 1) the presence of out-loud discrimination 2) the clues women pick up on in their interactions, and 3) the persistence of unequal results for women in areas they have been trying to gain equality for decades, there’s a good chance that gender bias is playing a role in any particular instance of a woman striving for something. 

Women have this bias against other women too—this is not just a bias men have. We grew up and still live in a world where most examples of success are men. Most of my role models and investors and sports heroes are men because that is who are most available and numerous as examples in those roles. 

The startup business advice books I read are all by men, and full of examples of how men succeeded. I appreciate them and try to apply their lessons to my life and business. I also hungrily follow the few dozen female leaders on LinkedIn who have taken their companies public or had other successful outcomes. 

Most of the hundreds of VCs I’ve pitched are men, and I’m so grateful for the ones that have invested (most are actually angel investors rather than VCs), because I wouldn’t have been able to build my business without them. Many of the ones that didn’t invest pointed me to the handful of funds that are owned by women, which was meant to be helpful, but all the female founders get pointed to the women-led funds, which themselves feel pressure to over-perform their male-led counterparts. Consequently the women-led funds have the most applicants and the highest vetting standards. It perpetuates the 2% rate to think it’s fine to just have lady funds for lady businesses. 

I follow the WNBA by subscribing to its app, which is the only way to watch it outside of the handful of games broadcast on major channels—they had the most ever this season. That league didn’t exist until I was 20 years old. But I’ve been able to watch professional and college men’s sports every weeknight and all weekend every weekend since I was a child. 

As a woman, these experiences of the world mess with your head in multiple ways. The lack of female leaders ahead of you, and watching the ones that are there lose, impacts what you see as possible for yourself, making you doubt whether the world will even allow you to get where you want. Will it allow you to see the specific goal you work for in your lifetime, or will you be one of the women who creates the possibility for a generation you won’t live to see, like the suffragettes we wear white to honor sometimes? 

Simultaneously, the lack of female leadership representation limits your own imagination about other women’s capabilities, ingraining biases about women can actually achieve in your own mind. 

A woman I look up to said “just because it hasn’t been done before doesn’t mean it’s impossible.” I believe that. And there isn’t anything to do other than to work for greater equality, whether I get to see it or not. When it happens isn’t entirely up to me, me, and I can only do my part. 

My part is to make sure I am not contributing to gender bias myself, and to encourage other men and women to examine the ways they can advance equality themselves. For me, that means listening more closely to women, envisioning how they can succeed, examining whether my doubts about them might be a product of my own limited imagination. Investing in them. Believing in them. Doing business with them. Voting for them. Following their lead. 

I invite you to join me.