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This is the equivalent, in proportion to her total wealth, of the average American donating about $350. Good for her, but is it really newsworthy? Let alone hacker-newsworthy?
Hackernews worthy:

- Applies to small businesses

So, yes, if we are a community of small businesses that might be eligible to apply or if we might know a company that is eligible to apply, then I'd say it's definitely hacker news worthy.

You're looking at it as cynically touting the amount as opposed to the perspective that it may be a small business's next week's funding.

Hate to break it to you but in America, rent and wages are paid in dollars, not % of net worth.
She will probably make a solid return when you account for the wage gap. More people should invest in women only companies.
> I know first hand what it’s like to be a small business owner. As a woman it can be lonely and scary, especially during a time like this.

Your sex does not matter during a time like this. Unless you are suffering from domestic violence, it is less scary to be a woman right now, since you are less affected by COVID-19 than men are.

Anyway, everybody should be able to help whoever he or she wants to help, and it is nice that she seemingly does so without strings attached.

The idea is that women have less access to various support networks that men do, typically referred to as the "boy's club", and therefore create their own replacements.
Depends what do you mean by "support networks". Like social? Or just purely economy based. Cause if social then I'd say it's the exact oppopsite, one of the main reason men has 3-4x higher suicide rate than women in the west.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_suicide

I also wonder what percentage of men(or male business owners) believe they are in or have access to a "boy's club"
Given amount of people I've talked to that believe they pulled themselves up by their boot straps, and then find out they have a trust fund or where able to find a couple hundred thousand from a friends and family fund round, I'm not sure how much that stat matters.
It matters if you're painting women as disadvantaged by not being be part of one, but, say, 99%+ of men don't belong to one. Meanwhile, ignoring women-only support networks(like the kind that gives $5M to female business owners....)
The "boy's club" isn't a formal institution. It's not like something you carry a card for.
I don't think anyone ever thought it was
Yes of course, but that's not very relevant. OP is specifically addressing business support, not social networks.
> Like social? Or just purely economy based.

It's both.

> Cause if social then I'd say it's the exact oppopsite, one of the main reason men has 3-4x higher suicide rate than women in the west.

Those stats are very different depending on the social class. Men have fewer support networks in lower social class, but more in the upper classes. Given that we're talking about business owners, that's the range we're talking about.

Small business owners are hardly "upper class".
The equity involved makes almost all small business owners at least upper middle class.
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I doubt that boy's clubs will save you right now. But maybe I just have not found the right clubs yet.
>The idea is that women have less access to various support networks that men do

Source? Is there a rigorous definition of a support network, and some statistics showing that women have less access to them?

Quite a few, here's one example. https://www.nber.org/papers/w26530
>Quite a few

Convenient.

Where do they suggest a rigorous definition of a support group in that article?

> Convenient.

So wait, let me get this straight

'I want an example of a study with data'

'here you go'

'well, well, well isn't that just convenient'

From here it feels like you're not approaching this argument in good faith.

> Where do they suggest a rigorous definition of a support group in that article?

They cover their methodology pretty clearly.

I don't think you could have gotten that less straight. What is convenient is that many definitions exist, so a convenient one can be chosen based on its suitability for making a particular argument at a particular time.

>They cover their methodology pretty clearly.

OK, but where do they suggest a rigorous definition of a support network, which is what I asked about?

There is a huge bias against women as can be seen by statistics of women in C-level positions, or on board seats, or as founders. The few that _do_ make it often make a strong point of supporting more -- and many statistics have proven they're often better at long term performance than men.

<---- I'm a dude

It's continuing the problem by criticizing someone helping women. Regardless of what "time" it is -- it's damn awesome she's willing to help, whoever she helps.

> There is a huge bias against women as can be seen by statistics of women in C-level positions, or on board seats, or as founders.

The presence of a statistical disparity does not automatically indicate malicious discrimination. I don't doubt that there is some amount of sexism present overall, but we're going to need more than uneven gender distribution to make this judgement.

What about any other jobs or where women are under- or over-represented, like teaching, or nursing, or construction? Are different gender distributions among those an indication of malicious discrimination or sexism in either direction?

... I didn't say anything about malicious discrimination? That's an obvious strawman argument

In fact the problem is exactly the opposite -- it's the lack of awareness that people unknowingly tend to choose people based off "gut feel" that a man will do better. This is well studied and documented and only recently have women started to enter the workforce and based off the few studies that show women in exec positions often do significantly better than the average male who are in those positions.

A few articles: - https://www.thebalance.com/do-companies-with-female-executiv... - https://www.statnews.com/2016/07/29/women-in-science/ - https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/16/success/women-ceos-and-cfos-o...

Founders? That's because women don't create successful companies at the same rate, but there's no bias stopping them creating firms. That's really one of the few areas you can say for sure, there's no bias. Quite the opposite. It's well known that VC firms fall over themselves at the chance to give a female founder money, it even happens that men take on women as 'co-founders' specifically to make it easier to raise money (I've encountered more than one story like that).

She is being criticised, rightfully, because what she's doing is sexism against men. Where's the consistency? Things like this show very bad double standards: women are allowed to openly discriminate against men, without consequences. That's just not right.

> That's because women don't create successful companies at the same rate

Please backup your arguments, because from what I've seen that's completely false. In fact, only 2.8% of VC dollars go to women, and that's considered an improvement: https://fortune.com/2020/03/02/female-founders-funding-2019/

There's _complete_ bias against them and only in the last 2-3 years has that started to turn around, and are obviously still behind it. Yeah, anecdotally you've heard of a few cases of it -- because people try to draw extra attention, but look at statistics (like above), and it's _clear_ that is the exception. This is what I observed when raising my own capital (with a female co-founder) and many of my colleagues doing the same -- and men were often very biased against women.

She's _balancing_ the discrimination -- again, look at the statistics above. She'll hardly budge it -- and this is _after_ many female-only funds have been created to try to balance it in recent years. We need to over compensate for our complete and utter discrimination before talking about "equality" among men -- there is NO equality.

Also, that is _false_ that women can openly discriminate against men -- it might be true in certain areas, but many areas (such as housing, employment, etc.)

We've been doing better in board member seats (20%, up from 17%): In the U.S., women hold about 20 percent of board seats at companies listed in the Russell 3000 stock index, up from 17 percent in 2018, according to the nonprofit 2020 Women on Boards.

But we're still hugely biased. Checkout other articles I listed to other response as well

Everytime I see a news piece like this I wanna write a very snarky comment.

Then I change my mind because I am not being productive. But, after all, it is impossible to talk on the subject productively.