JANUARY 28, 2015. WE ALL HOPE SaaS product Glassbreakers will break the glass.
She says:
"Viagra but No Abortions
The Glassbreakers women are launching a product for women,
designed to solve a problem women understand better than men, in an economic
sector that has traditionally produced products shaped by the minds of young
men for young men. It’s inarguable that white, upper-middle-class young men
have applied the new technologies to make things that reflect their desires and
culture and foisted them on the world. Women who complain about sexist video
games get death threats from legions of boyfans conditioned by formative years
on the Xbox controller to believe it’s their right to rescue—or maybe
assault—wasp-waisted half-naked damsels in distress. And the anonymity of the
Internet has proved relatively more menacing to women.
None of these ill effects are deliberate, but they are built
into designs and products created almost solely by one gender. As recently as
2011, for example, Apple made a Siri who could find prostitutes and Viagra but
not abortion providers.
Reviewing the movie The Social Network, the
writer Zadie Smith wrote that everything about Facebook is “reduced to the size
of its founder. Poking, because that’s what shy boys do to girls they are
scared to talk to.” Ultimately, she wrote,The Social Network wasn’t
“a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called ‘Mark Zuckerberg.’
It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the
recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.”
Frustrated, women in Silicon Valley seem to be segregating
themselves in women-only venture funds or starting gender-gated funds.
Costello says that the sexual harassment lawsuits and the
public talk about endless ugly events is a sign that things are changing. 'We
are in a major time of shift. There is no other time when women have been
better educated, earning a majority of undergraduate and graduate degrees and
serving in equal numbers in nearly all professions. The control of personal
wealth is about equal, as baby boomer men are dying earlier and women are
inheriting money from their parents and husbands and have their own assets from
working. If we can access 2 percent of that money controlled by women, we don’t
need to be begging on Sand Hill Road.' "
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