[pas]

Due to path dependency of history it's silly to look at proposed policies in an idealized world (or in a vacuum as physicists would say).

So the question becomes who much unfairness is now due to the past practices (the past negative discrimination of women), and can that be corrected through giving some kind of advantage to women?

Maybe the answer is that none at all, because people will just think that every women founder is just there because of the gratis advantage.

Or maybe it'll really help push a lot of women toward entrepreneurship and the market won't look at how they started.

I bet Stripe did a lot of discussion about this and they are at least somewhat better informed than us. (And since Atlas is available internationally it could help a lot of women to break out of their respective seemingly hopeless situation - 500 USD is worth a lot in quite a few places in the world.)