Women founders & team respect
What to do when respect is missing
I’ve recently been in conversation with a handful of women founders who feel they are not receiving the full respect of their teams. These are teams they’ve personally hired, or who their co-founder has hired, and whom either report to them, report up through other leaders to them, or are “junior” to them in the org structure. These women are the founders of companies: the CEOs, the CTOs, and COOs.
This is one of the most nuanced and difficult topics I’ve written on, and I’m sure I will get stuff wrong here. In the places that I generalize, know that I’m speaking from my direct experience and the trends I’ve noticed from supporting other women founders as a coach. I do not intend for my experience or theirs to represent the experience of all women founders, and in particular I’ll note that I do not expect my experience as a white, queer, cis-gender woman in the US to represent the experience of any other founders. And yet, there’s enough of a trend here that this is something worth talking about.
It brings me so much sadness that this is something many women founders have to deal with. Founding a company is hard enough; having to earn the respect of your team at a basic level day-in-and-day-out can be exhausting.
When you’re on the receiving end of this type of bias, it is so hard to know if it’s just you and something you should be doing better, or if it’s truly a gendered bias. If you’re the only woman founder in your company, it can be especially hard to disentangle these things because there’s no one with that shared experience to talk to to pattern match. “Am I crazy, or is this real?” was something that’s come up time and time again in my career in tech, and the thing that helps the most is talking to other women to see if this is something they are experiencing too.
In my opinion, the world we live in is biased against women in tech. In the culture I grew up in (the US), women were not expected to lean as much into STEM fields as men. The moment we cross into that world, there’s a hesitation about whether we belong here. This hesitation comes both from within us due to the cultural messages we’ve been sent and from the people receiving us into the STEM world of all genders. (Again, not speaking to every woman’s experience here, just to my own.)
Imposter syndrome can be insidious. Despite having a nearly perfect GPA at MIT, I always thought it was somehow funny or out of place for me to be an engineer. This was reinforced with subtle and not-so-subtle messages: “you don’t look like you go to MIT” from peers or even worse, my actual professor hitting on me. I never would have named it as imposter syndrome while I was in college because I deeply felt I belonged there, but that was where the messages started to creep in.
In my decade+ career in tech, I’ve experienced almost every shitty cliché: being paid less than male peers and needing to fight big tech to change that, having male peers and managers use their physical size to intimidate me, and, the most insidious one, feeling like I had to prove myself in every single meeting every single day because everything I said was questioned.
We never really get away from it. I started a company for many reasons, but one of them was because I’d get to create a culture that was friendlier to women and diverse people. Even as we start companies that we own, we learn we still have to navigate the heavily biased VC industry. And for those who are struggling to earn the basic respect of your team, damn, that sucks.
I won’t try to offer perfect solutions for those who are facing this; all solutions are imperfect. Addressing the symptoms of patriarchy doesn’t “fix” it. The best we can do is waste as little energy as possible swimming up that stream because the boulder we are pushing uphill to build a company is hard enough. The world we live in is biased, and our energy is best spent focused on our own sphere of influence. This is something I work with women founders on, and I’m still learning what’s most helpful to women besides myself. Here’s how I’m thinking about this problem, and I’d be so curious to hear from other women founders how you’ve approached this (if you have).
In the simplest terms, my (imperfect) solutions for women founders facing a lack of respect from their own teams are:
Know your truth
Communicate your truth
Choose a team that gets it
Know your truth
Your truth is what you know to be the best decision given the information you have. As the founder, you usually have the most information for critical decisions.
I see some women founders hesitating on decisions they’ve made, sometimes because they are getting more pushback from their team than a man might. Just because your team doesn’t fully agree with you doesn’t mean you are wrong. And yet, because women are socialized to be peacekeepers and focus more on relationships and keeping people happy, some women may be more likely to prioritize the perspective of their teams. That’s ok. Getting the team’s input and bringing people along for the journey is a superpower that will help folks feel bought in. At the same time, there’s a delicate balance between taking input while still holding true to what you know the right decision is.
One of the things I work with folks on is tuning into their truth via the pathway of the body. So many of the decisions we make as founders are based on gut intuition, and there’s actual signals that our body sends us to tell us when we’re on course and when we’ve veered off. Learning to tune into these signals and not suppress them is essentially tapping into your own inner wisdom. Allow that voice of truth to become louder than the voices of folks who disagree.
When you know your truth decisively, it is much easier to communicate it as a clear decision and have it be honored.
Communicate your truth
Because we’ve been socialized to be peacekeepers, our default language choices may not be as definitive and clear as they could be.
I’ll restate that sentence more directly: Women are taught to prioritize people’s feelings, so when we communicate, we use softer language that is less direct and clear.
Why did I do that? Even in this piece, I’m hedging against judgement, against offending women who don’t feel this way, and trying to avoid any asshole trolls. The more I use phrases like “may not be,” the softer my statements are, and the less likely I am to activate blowback in the comments. If I put out a declarative statement like “women are taught to prioritize people’s feelings,” I run the risk of triggering someone who disagrees with that statement. Since I care about people’s feelings, if I get an angry comment about misrepresentation or generalizations, or I offend someone, I’ll both feel bad about that and want to somehow make it better. This is why I (and many other women) use softer and less direct language.
The clearer and more direct you can make your communication, especially once you’ve made a decision, the more the team will learn to receive the message and execute it. It can be helpful to clarify when you are sharing a decision that is still open for discussion and feedback and one that is not. For example, if you’ve made a decision to move into a new market and it’s time to execute, tell the team that. But, if you’ve got a straw man decision, e.g., you think the company should move into a new market but you’re still gathering data, then let the team know “this is the likely decision, and I’m open to input.”
It can also help to clarify who the decision-maker is for different decisions and who gets to have input. E.g., if you are the CEO, and the CTO is evaluating whether to swap the engineering team over to a new technology that will cost more, you might clarify that you’d like to have input on that decision because it trades off against burn rate, but that ultimately it’s the CTO’s call. And, for product strategy, you’ll want the CTO and engineering team’s input, but ultimately it is your call what the final strategy is.
Communication is so incredibly nuanced and this is something I’m still learning and getting better at. One of the breakthrough books for me on this subject was Unbound: A Woman’s Guide to Power by Kasia Urbaniak. She is both a trained Daoist nun and a professional dominatrix, so she deeply understands human to human energetics, power dynamics, and communication in a way I’ve never seen covered elsewhere.
Choose a team that gets it
One thing I’ve learned the hard way is it is very hard to change a company culture without changing the people. Leadership and culture comes from the top. That means that you and your co-founders are setting the norms that the rest of the company will mirror. If the source issue of respect is between you and your co-founder, start there.
If you are a solo founder or feel fully supported and respected by your co-founder(s) and you are still feeling this, start to address it during 1:1s with the individual employees you are experiencing it with. Simply bringing it into awareness will often make a big difference, especially since you are the one in charge.
If there’s still someone who’s a great asset to the team but not “getting it”, have another conversation with them directly about it. Tell them your truth, whatever that is. For example: You respect them as an individual, you value their contributions to the team, but when you share your decisions, they push back too hard which makes you feel like they don’t respect you as a leader. And then get curious about what’s happening for them. They probably do respect you as a leader, they just might not be showing it in their communication. If they are able to turn a corner, fantastic. If not, they might not be a great fit for your company. You have too many other priorities to spend a lot of time educating your team on how to respect you.
One preventative measure here is to select for this in the interview process, and do extensive reference checks. If folks have been found to be argumentative, not “play well with others”, or have anything less than stellar references, don’t hire them. Trust your gut when making offers; if there’s any hesitation at all, honor that.
Another thing I’ve noticed is diverse teams attract diverse teams. If you have a higher ratio of women on your team than a typical team in tech, not only will more women want to work with you, you’ll also find that men who value working with diverse teams will find their way to you. And that set of people will likely respect you more out of the gates.
Closing thoughts
This is a topic near and dear to my heart, as it’s something I’ve struggled with and learned to grow through. If this is something you’ve been facing, know that you are not the only one. If you’d like support on this, feel free to reach out: lunarayemail@gmail.com.