International Women's Day makes us uncomfortable. And we think it should make a lot of people uncomfortable.
Not because the intent is wrong, but because of what it has become: an annual performance of support that costs nothing, changes nothing, and lets everyone go back to business as usual by March 9.
Here is our problem with it: The moment you celebrate someone as a "female founder," you have already put them in a box. You have made gender the headline. And in doing so, you have, however gently, reminded the room that this person is a special case. An exception. Someone to be applauded for showing up, rather than someone to be backed because they are serious and exceptional.
We think it’s wrong, and here’s why.
The separate table is not helpful
Look at what "supporting female founders" actually looks like in practice. Panels for women. Breakfasts for women. Mentorship circles for women. Communities for women. All thoughtfully branded, well-meaning, and almost entirely beside the point.
Because even though women supporting women is real, and often powerful, what we actually need is not a parallel ecosystem. We need access to the main one.
The relationships that move companies forward are not built at women's networking events. They are built in the rooms we are still not consistently invited into, through the school ties, golf courses, parties and group chats we were never included in. The infrastructure of access that nobody officially built, but everyone seems to be using.
That is what we want access to. Not a parallel version of it.
And when people do want to actively support us, the gap between gesture and commitment is worth naming: Another breakfast event is a gesture. A wire transfer is a commitment. A signed term sheet is a commitment. A referral to a customer who actually has a budget is a commitment.
We appreciate the former, but we are asking for the latter.
Stop making difficulty our identity
We also want to push back against the relentless focus on how hard it is to be a woman building a company.
Yes, bias exists. Yes, the funding gap is real and the data is damning. None of that should be minimised. But when "female founder" becomes synonymous with "person facing extra obstacles," something goes wrong.
Every setback gets interpreted through a gendered lens. Every missed raise becomes evidence of systemic discrimination, whether it is or not. And beyond the politics of it, there is a simpler problem: we don't want to think about it. Not because the data isn't real, but because a founder who is busy cataloguing her disadvantages is not the same founder who walks into a room and commands it. The victim framing doesn't just misrepresent us — it gets in the way.
Here’s what nobody says out loud: maybe some of our businesses aren't good enough. Maybe that is why they didn't get funded. Maybe that is why they didn't scale. And that needs to be okay. Not every female founder is a hidden gem being overlooked by a broken system. Some of us take big swings and miss. Some of us build the wrong thing. Some of us fail, plainly and ordinarily, the way founders of all kinds do all the time.
We want that to be celebrated, not mourned. She was brave. She went for it. That kind of failure is not a tragedy to be pitied. It is evidence of someone playing the game seriously. The moment we treat female founders who stumble as casualties of a rigged system rather than entrepreneurs who took a real risk, we are back to charity. And we don't want charity. We want to be held to the same standard, including the standard that says failure is part of the deal, and that it doesn't require an explanation rooted in our gender.
Society needs to make room for the female founder who tried and didn't make it, without treating it as proof of anything other than the fact that building venture scale companies is hard.
The constant framing of women as a problem to be solved is its own form of othering. And we are exhausted by it.
The ask is simpler than people want it to be
In venture capital investing, familiarity seems to be doing a lot of background work that nobody wants to examine too closely. It’s reducing one of the hardest judgement calls in business to a checklist of surface signals.
In an industry structurally wired for pattern recognition and herd behaviour, momentum is a lot easier to catch when the founder already looks like the last person who made everyone money. In a business built on finding outliers, that is simply bad investing.
The answer is not a lower bar, a separate track, or a quota. It is to apply the same bar properly. To ask whether you are actually assessing founder quality, or whether you are still mistaking resemblance for potential.
So today, on International Women's Day, here is what we actually want: Not a celebration. Not a panel. Not a breakfast.
Invite us into the same rooms. Make the same bets. Apply the same standards. Be ruthless about your own pattern recognition. Extend the same presumption of competence you extend to everyone else.
Then let the work speak for itself. That is the whole ask. It has always been the whole ask.
