Gutting the Gut Decision

A short time ago, A VC named John Greathouse published an op ed piece in the WSJ — in the Leadership section, no less — urging women to get noticed by VCs with the unique stratagem of disguising their gender by using their initials instead of their names.

“A gender-neutral persona allows women to access opportunities that might otherwise be closed to them,” reasoned Greathouse. He bolsters his argument with the famous story of how introducing blind auditions transformed the mostly male symphony orchestras of the 70s to the gender-balanced orchestras of today.

The point of the orchestra audition story, of course, is that that women are hired more often by symphony orchestras when the hiring manager’s natural biases against women are stymied.

That Greathouse takes the famous symphony orchestra auditions story and subverts it to the cause of sexism rather than its erasure is sort of incredible to me, but it’s also just another day in the life of being a woman.

Greathouse defends his initial suggestion with some more dubiously applied research conclusions:

“Studies have shown that the less time someone has, the greater degree they rely on their gut, rather than data, when evaluating someone for the first time. These initial impressions might be positive or negative — but they are seldom neutral.”

This actually gets at the core of what is wrong with Greathouse’s worldview informing his op-ed, which is not sexism per se, but rather overconfidence in his personal schema, or, put another way, glorification of his gut.

Perhaps if he’d read farther down the research extract* about the orchestra curtain study Mr. Greathouse would have found another quote, equally quotable, and with far more wisdom:

“With effort, we can overcome our biases to some extent, but we are continually tasked with needing to correct ourselves.”

At first I was angry when I read the WSJ piece but after all Mr. Greathouse represents a group of people that are definitely listening to male *him* more than they are listening to female *me*, so I immediately changed my Angel List profile, adding initials and even a moustache to my profile pic, for good measure.

And it worked! Sort of — I did receive a few more profile views. So the advice to disguise one’s femaleness might actually be effective…. in the same way cutting off your foot to prevent the spread of an infected cut is effective.

There’s surely a better way, but don’t look to Mr. Greathouse to suggest it — he’s been pretty quiet after a tweeted mea culpa, not that I blame him but I do h0pe we haven’t heard the last from him. There are a lot of us women out here in entrepreneur land wanting to know how the furor over the op-ed shakes out for our Prodigal VC: will the apology be the end of it? (I hope not; that’s too much like just being sorry you got caught being sexist, vs. being sorry for learning you *are* sexist) or will our hero back his new realizations with actions that seek to actively benefit women seeking funding?

Regardless, I’m grateful to Mr. Greathouse for wanting to help, misguided as this early effort is. The wanting to help is more important than the failing to help —he has a platform, and it’s in everyone’s best interest, not just women’s, that he uses it to help bring some much needed light on worthy women entrepreneurs deserving of investment.

More inspiring is Medium’s Ross Fubini, who calls himself “dismayed and bewildered” the by Greathouse op-ed, and charges the business community to confront the intellectual dishonesty inherent in ‘going with the gut’.

“They say that they believe in diversity of thought, but their pattern matching habits cause them to prematurely narrow their aperture before giving certain entrepreneurs a chance to prove themselves.”

Fubini is right that pattern matching habits can be as destructive as they are time saving. Or, as Hollywood director Paul Haggis muses in Miss Representation, out of time-pressed, unthinking laziness.

Cognitive behaviorists call these habits your personal schema which is basically your particular filtered way of seeing the world. Personal schema are invaluable to the busy business person, enabling rapid decision making..but they are dangerous too, limiting one’s focus to familiar approaches that worked in the past, but may not be appropriate for changing circumstances.

For Greathouse, the changing circumstance is more women in business. His personal schema, and that of many of his VC /angel compatriots, seems to be limited to experiencing women as wives and mothers and daughters at home, functionaries without leadership capabilities in business, and inconsequential eye candy everywhere else. It’s not his fault or any other man’s fault — it’s a case of individual innocence but collective guilt. As Annie Liebowitz says, the imagery of women has to catch up with the imagery of men.”

Her project Women: New Portraits subverts the dominant paradigm, seeking as it does to capture women’s character rather than their physical beauty.

“You can’t look at all those images without seeing the true human diversity of women, not characterized by whatever feminine idea or roles of who we’re supposed to be.” ~Gloria Steinem

The show will come to San Francisco next spring, and I hope Mr. Greathouse will go to see it, and maybe even blog about it.

Back to personal schema — they are not always right, but they are almost always more powerful than rationality. Just ask Rudy Giuliani. Donald Trump’s business has gone bankrupt four times, has more than 3,500 lawsuits against him by small business owners, used his charity as a slush fund and who now has been revealed to have lost more than $915 million — in a year in which the stock market gained 37 percent! — and Giuliani says

“Don’t you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the United States than a woman?”

One wonders what sort of women Giuliani surrounds himself with, that he can’t imagine any woman — any woman at all — able to lose less than $915 million in a single year.

By contrast, when President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act Bill, he revealed a personal schema that could serve Silicon Valley well (though you shouldn’t need to have daughters to share the schema):

I want my daughters to grow up in a nation that values their contributions, where there are no limits to their dreams and they have opportunities their mothers and grandmothers never could have imagined.

And Now a Message From John Travolta

If you were born before 1980 you know about the Boy in the Plastic Bubble (played in a made for TV movie by John Travolta), who suffered from a severe autoimmune disorder that required he live in a protective bubble. When he becomes a teenager he balks at this state of affairs, mostly because his lovely neighbor Glynnis O’Connor has also become a teenager, and he understandably wants to kiss her without a wall of plastic between them.

He must decide between following his heart or remaining in his protective bubble forever. His doctors say well, you’ve built up *some* immunities and it *may* be ok to venture forth but…

That’s all Bubble Boy needed to hear, he steps out of his anti-contamination chamber and into the waiting arms of a life with more risks than if he stayed safely in the bubble…but also infinitely more reward, including fresh air, and of course the lovely Glynnis.

Silicon Valley venture capitalists and angels investing in entrepreneurs and their start-up companies have a similar dilemma: remain in their tried-and-true male privilege bubble investing in primarily male-led companies….or step out of the bubble into a world that includes the virtually unlimited rewards of investing in women. If that weren’t reward enough, consider that investing in women is something the best and brightest among us,— our scientific community — are leading the way. Diversity, it turns out, goes to the heart of how to do research and innovation effectively.

According to the Scientific American report Diversity in Science: Why It Is Essential for Excellence:

For diversity to be effective, the working environment must be right. For an individual, it takes conscious effort to be on the watch for unconscious biases and to overcome them.

For an organization, it takes processes, procedures and an ethos of acceptance.

Beautiful Music

The nations’s most accomplished musical organizations shifted nearly 50% when they discovered and rooted out gender bias. What might the entrepreneurial landscape look like when the boys of Silicon Valley step out of their bubble?

In the Op-Ed he no doubt wishes he never wrote, Greathouse reasoned that “If you assume investors and tech hiring managers are rational and their ultimate goal is to maximize their success, it is fair to also assume they will seek the most promising investments and employees, irrespective of race or gender.”

To which I say, it is fair also to assume that they will be victim to the irrationalities of their snap judgements, and that they cannot expect that they will find the best investments and employees until they can recognize and correct for these biases, created by personal schema that do not include images of women as successful entrepreneurs and leaders.

Hollywood’s Narrow, Money Losing Male Aperture

According to a recent report, women only said 27% of the words in 2016’s biggest movies. Based on Mr. Greathouse’s logic, males talk so much more on screen because that’s where the money is, right? Sure, except there’s even more money in films where women are the leads or share the lead than when males lead alone. A lot more money, actually; according to a detailed analysis by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media,

• Films led by women grossed 15.8% more on average than films led by men
• Films featuring male and female co-leads earned 23.5% more on average than films with male or female leads alone.

If You Want Excellence, Include Women

Before the blind audition standard was widely adopted, there were doubtless many naysayers arguing that men were simply superior classical musicians compared to women. Some probably argued that all the great composers are men, thinking this tautology somehow proves the lack of female representation in music chambers proved women don’t belong.

But when orchestras adopted ‘conscious correction in their audition methods , the goal was not to increase the representation of women, but to field the best musicians for the orchestra. The elimination of bias resulted in raising the standard of the quality of music, shifting orchestral membership by nearly 50%.

Similarly, without such a ‘conscious correction’ in Silicon Valley among VCs and tech firms, it is fair to assume that, as in the case of the musicians, many of the most promising investments and leaders are going unrecognized/ missed.