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.
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.)
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.