Women in Business Face More than One Glass Ceiling
The worlds of tech and entrepreneurship are at the cutting edge in so many respects, but equality and respect for women aren’t one of them. Instead, the industries meant to define our future lag shamefully behind. Young women in the industry start their careers earning almost 30% less than male counterparts. Female start-up founders receive a paltry 2% of venture capital funds. Only 9% of executive officers in Silicon Valley are women, despite the fact that companies with female CEOs perform better on average.
That’s to say nothing of the rampant discrimination and harassment women put up with once they manage to break into the industry. This is something I’ve experienced personally throughout my career. Even when women do manage to break through the “glass ceiling” and sit atop the corporate ladder, I’ve come to realise that working for a woman — especially a no-nonsense, highly disciplined one like I am — is difficult for many men. In fact, as many as three-quarters of men admit that they would rather work for a man than a woman.
They never tell you this when you hire them, but you learn it — and suffer the consequences — over time. It’s an incredibly hurtful experience to realize someone you’ve placed a lot of trust in sees you as less capable simply because you’re a woman. I will confess that I have found myself in this position several times. Peers and counterparts have told me I give people the benefit of the doubt too easily, but I like to see the best in everyone. As a result, when I bring someone on board, I tend to believe that they genuinely want to be part of a company’s success.
Unfortunately, some of my former employees have taken this optimism as carte blanche to take advantage of me and the firm. Two of these cases have hit especially close to home. Amit Pau, the Managing Director of Ariadne London, and David Barry, my Managing Director in Malta, were two men I placed my trust in, only to realise later that neither could handle having a female boss. Even as they made this increasingly clear by refusing to follow my direction or making passive aggressive remarks, I tried to take the high road. After all, they were only hurting me personally and the firm came first.
Unfortunately, they soon started to harm my firm as well. David failed to follow up on a client lead from one of our shareholders, costing Ariadne almost €400,000 a year, while I caught Amit red-handed diverting business away from Ariadne to another firm he was involved in.
In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised by Amit and David’s behaviour. Studies have shown that most men feel threatened by female supervisors and expect more money from them than from a male boss. All the same, it was tremendously hard psychologically to deal with the fact that those I hired and trusted to help me build my firm were either lining their own pockets or sabotaging the firm.
Sadly, they were by no means the only ones. One of our senior advisors, Steve Lazarus, sent me timesheets that only accounted for 5% of his time, forcing me to dispute his invoices. This isn’t just Lazarus being unscrupulous. Instead, fits into a documented (and depressing) trend of men trying to fleece their female bosses out of money.
I’ve been stunned at how this discrimination has even extended into the justice system, though perhaps I shouldn’t be. There are ample examples of judges handing down unsolicited moral lectures or otherwise brazenly letting their personal bias influence their judgements. Most lawyers will tell you off the record that the courts rarely want to disadvantage the party they perceive as weaker — they feel that if a lesser party has taken someone to court, they should be rewarded for having fought all the way through.
I’m no billionaire, but courts routinely assume I’m a mega-wealthy individual and hold my success against me. I was appalled when I heard a judge say on the record in court, “Well, it’s awfully good that Ms. Meyer was able to show up in Court today; Ms. Meyer — not off doing a multi-million-pound deal today are you?” I’ve seen lawyers drop their jaws at the level of bias shown against me and confide, “I’ve never seen someone so unsympathetically treated in court”. It’s this kind of biased treatment that makes me wonder if a comparatively successful businessman would be addressed with such contempt.
This condescension my lawyers were so shocked by is one of the devastating consequences of this kind of widespread bias. The pattern of not taking women seriously doesn’t just affect our salaries, our chances of getting ahead in our careers, and our working relationships. It also makes men think they can rob us blind and we won’t notice, or won’t strike back. It makes supposedly impartial judges mock us as we trying to defend ourselves. It gives personal attacks and allegations, no matter how baseless, amazing sticking power.
As my company has grown and gathered positive press, I’ve been the target of more of these unsubstantiated accusations than I could have ever imagined. I’ve been stunned at the way people like Tom Winnifreth, whose journalistic ethos are dubious at best, has been allowed to attack me daily with a level of obsession that’s just plain weird. Tom even sunk to going after my religious beliefs, all without disclosing that Amit was his former business partner and that he has his own axe to grind.
I wish that I could dismiss Tom as an isolated case, but I’ve seen this kind of unprofessionalism too many times. The Malta Independent published an article making serious allegations against me without even calling me for comment or checking their facts. I was amazed that in this day and age in the EU, a newspaper would make these sort of claims — knowing that they would widely circulated online — without verifying the facts or calling the subject of their article to ask for their take on the matter.
But then again, many things have amazed me about the daily reality of being a female entrepreneur. Despite these challenges, however, I remain relentlessly optimistic about women’s future in the industry. I’m firmly convinced that women bring a unique set of qualities — trust, transparency, bottom-up teamwork — to leadership roles and to the tech and entrepreneurship sectors in particular. It’s just a matter of time before more men realise how valuable these are.
More broadly, I’m persuaded that there’s going to be a system-level change to stop the tide of misinformation which afflicts so many entrepreneurs and drives far too many out of the industry. I don’t know what form that will take. It could be anything from steeper penalties for defamation, to harmonisation of defamation laws across the EU, to a special insurance scheme for newspapers. I may not be sure what the ultimate solution will be, but I am confident it is out there.
