[CodeMage]

> If the risk is, "I have to watch every little thing I say/joke with a female founder lest I get blacklisted", if I was a VC, I might choose to avoid female founders altogether.

That's rich. People who think like that should really take some time to read a few first-person accounts on sexism and misogyny in tech industry. Once you've read about how women have to worry about their appearance and behavior on a daily basis just to be able to somewhat tone down the sexism they're exposed to, men's complaints about how they might have to start worrying a bit more become laughable.

To illustrate, here's an excerpt from the Forbes story making rounds on Twitter [1]:

Unlike my male peers, who could wear anything from jeans and a hoodie to a well-tailored suit, I had to choose my attire carefully. Feminine but not sexy, structured but not form fitting, classy but not too expensive, lest I imply that I was bad at bootstrapping and not "scrappy enough," professional but not so stuffy that people would assume our product lacked creativity. My hair was almost always worn in a bun or pulled back conservatively.

During the ten years that I worked in international development, clothing was a tool to defuse gender, a strategy for gaining access to an almost exclusively male professional environment. We referred to it as "taking on the third gender." For all its self-regard as the most forward-thinking place on earth, it seemed I would need to use the same tactics in Silicon Valley.

[1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2014/08/07/what-it...