"Mr. Mateen told Ms. Wolfe that the reason she could no longer hold herself out as a co-founder was that she was a 24-year-old “girl” with little experience. Once again he said that holding her out as a co-founder “makes the company look like a joke” and “devalues the company.” Mr. Mateen tried to justify the situation by saying “Facebook and Snapchat don’t have girl founders, it just makes it look like Tinder was some accident.” Further, as Mr. Rad informed Ms. Wolfe, IAC would not let her be publicly recognized as a co-founder."
It's rare to see sexism in tech spelled out so blatantly. If the above is true, that's absolutely despicable.
The deep irony if this is that at the time this conversation allegedly took place, Mateen was just a 26 year old "boy" a few years out of school. It takes a lot of balls to pull the age card on someone two years younger than you.
It's so many levels of weird thinking. You have to be really far down the VC-istan rabbit hole if you're worried about your founders' genders and how that is perceived. None of Tinder's users care about the co-founders and the company's creation myth - they are worried about the perception among funders, and this is the same community that's always trumpeting about what a meritocracy it is.
There's a decent chance to get into racism as well, if you look at the content of the texts and the sender.
As an aside, I found it a little hard to take the texts seriously--such atrocious spelling and grammar! On an old candybar I've typed more clearly and at greater length. For shame.
Don't be silly, that has nothing to do with sexism in tech and everything to do with sexism of a single idiot. I, for one, would be really happy to have a girl co-founder (I would be equally happy to have a guy co-founder, though).
That's great for you. But (if he wrote it) he didn't write that in a bubble. He wrote it in an environment where an overwhelming proportion of startups are founded by young white men. Put another way, a man in a rural southern town calling Obama the n-word is just a solitary act, but one cannot discount the racism of that man's peers in promoting the use of that word to describe black people.
It's rare to see sexism in tech spelled out so blatantly. If the above is true, that's absolutely despicable.