Holmes is the product @ Theranos. It's evidently clear their blood testing machine doesn't actually work. If you look at the positive (old) media coverage of Theranos, the lion-share of it revolved around her dropping out of Stanford, female founder, and hell I for some reason know she played an instrument as a kid... The cult of personality was used to raise funds, not the Edison.

Well thank goodness we have a token female founder who dropped out of Stanford and is apparently not qualified to run a Taco Bell.

Am I the only one who thinks this is far more harmful to the cause of getting more women in tech/entrepreneurial roles than helpful? This whole thing is a bad joke.

What's harmful is looking at someone in this kind of position primarily as a woman.

Compare the treatment of Holmes to that of Parker Conrad, the ousted Zenefits CEO. Conrad is a white guy who went to prestigious New York schools and then Harvard.

Is anyone saying that Conrad doing a bad job as a founder CEO will be harmful to white Harvard graduates everywhere? Of course not. You only "reflect badly" on your peer group if it's a minority.

> Is anyone saying that Conrad doing a bad job as a founder CEO will be harmful to white Harvard graduates everywhere?

No, because people have plenty of competing examples of white male Harvard graduate CEOs of startups. So one outstanding failure (or unusual, for the category, success, for that matter) barely moves the needle on the expectations of the category.

> You only "reflect badly" on your peer group if it's a minority.

Well, yes, the smaller the group is in the targeted field, the more significant each example is in terms of the visible outcomes of that group in the field, and, also, the more a group is excluded from a field because of a bias that the group is not suited for the field, the more a failure from the group reinforces that bias.

(I'm not saying that its not wrong, or that its not often the result of people failing to look beyond the superficial to understand the individual factors, because all that's true.)

When there isn't much data, you shouldn't be segmenting your population. Instead it is common in data analysis to collapse variables to have meaningful observations. Why would that be any different here?

Holmes has been sold to us as a woman. On the other hand, there is no need to sell a Harvard degree to anyone, everyone knows that there are benefits in being a Harvard Man.

> She's led a company that has either committed such gross negligence as to not be trustworthy to operate a lemonade stand let alone a medical company OR been openly defrauding both consumers and the Government but remains near as makes no difference completely unaffected and will walk away not only a millionaire, but apparently still employed.

There's a lot more investigations still going on where she might face personal consequences (including criminal ones), and she's still employed because she is both the employee and the employer (being the majority shareholder of the firm by which she is employed), so to be fired, she'd have to fire herself.

Of course, she's only employed as long as Theranos can stay in business, and its hard to see how they do that going forward.