Why startup systems quietly fail women—and how to fix them

Let’s drop the safe language. If you’re building a company and think hiring more women will fix your diversity problem, you’re already missing the point. Inclusion isn’t a headcount metric. It’s an execution system. And right now, most systems in high-growth environments still penalize women—quietly, structurally, repeatedly.

Martine Haas’s research doesn’t just point to bias—it exposes where execution frameworks break. Where power defaults to loud voices. Where strategy rooms reward advocacy in men and punish it in women. Where the work women do is categorized as “support,” even when it moves the needle. And founders don’t see it—not until the damage is baked in.

Here’s the founder illusion:
“We’re merit-based. We promote who performs. We’ve got women on the team.”

But look closer.
Who gets to drive the roadmap? Who challenges leadership without risk? Who owns strategic OKRs—not just delivery tasks?

That’s the delta Martine Haas exposes. Inclusion isn’t about who’s in the room—it’s about who gets to shape it. And in most early-stage startups, the systems weren’t built for that. Startups scale chaos fast. But if that chaos favors dominance, speed, and informal networks, you’ve just scaled fragility—and masked it as culture.

Most early-stage systems are unspoken. They run on assumptions, patterns, and founder instincts. That’s fine at five people. It’s fatal at fifty.

Let’s break down where it unravels:

1. Feedback Loops
Startups love fast feedback. But when it’s informal, undocumented, and relationship-based, it rewards access—not clarity. Men are more likely to get early-stage coaching because they’re looped in casually. Women? They get performance reviews with no buildup—and the surprise that they’re “not ready yet.”

2. Promotion Criteria
Words like “executive presence,” “gravitas,” or “founder instinct” get tossed around as if they’re objective. They’re not. They’re proxies for cultural fit—often defined by white, male leadership norms. This isn’t about preference. It’s about how pattern-matching quietly reinforces exclusion.

3. Meeting Dynamics
Martine Haas calls it out: airtime ≠ impact. But in many leadership teams, the person who speaks first or with the most conviction gets the decision to tilt their way. When women hedge, qualify, or ask a question instead of asserting—it’s seen as uncertainty, not depth.

These aren’t culture flaws. They’re execution defects.

Founders often say: “But our team is 40% women!” Okay. But in what roles? If your women are all in ops, marketing, or HR—and your product, eng, and strategy leaders are all men—you’ve got a structural gap, not just a pipeline problem.

Here’s the diagnostic:
Who owns no?
Who can say, “We’re not shipping that”?
Who pushes back on the CEO and gets heard—not sidelined?

Representation without veto power is decoration. This is why diversity dashboards are a trap. They make you feel inclusive while your system keeps excluding.

This isn’t just a values issue. It’s an efficiency problem.

When women self-edit, under-speak, or quietly exit, you lose:

• Risk calibration from someone outside the echo chamber
• Customer intuition from lived experience (especially in B2C)
• Conflict mediation that doesn’t escalate to dysfunction

Startups need range. Not just velocity. And yet the traits that build long-term value—thoughtful dissent, systems design, risk-awareness—often get discounted as “non-urgent.” What gets recognized, gets repeated. And what gets ignored, quietly disappears. That’s how startups scale silence.

Founders want to believe they’re fair. But fairness isn’t felt. It’s systematized. Most founders miss the inflection point where vibe turns into structure. That’s usually around Series A—when team size doubles, pressure rises, and instinct-based leadership breaks.

They keep thinking they can spot and fix bias personally. But here’s the brutal truth:
If your system needs you to personally ensure fairness, it’s not fair. It’s a bottleneck.

Martine Haas’s lens is clear: systems don’t lie. If women aren’t thriving, it’s not about personality. It’s about process.

Let’s skip the workshops and get tactical.

Here’s how you fix it—not in theory, but in systems:

1. Normalize Structured Feedback

Stop waiting for performance reviews to surface risk. Start with quarterly 360s—anonymous, structured, and role-specific. Use rubrics. Remove subjectivity. Track feedback frequency by gender. If women are getting less input, that’s a system leak.

2. Redefine Promotion Inputs

Kill the vibe-based checklist. Replace “strategic thinker” with: “Has led two cross-functional launches with measurable OKRs.” Replace “founder energy” with: “Pushed initiative from 0 to execution with peer buy-in.”

Codify the behaviors. Remove the guesswork.

3. Track Decision Participation

Audit who’s in the room for product direction, hiring loops, funding decks. Then audit who speaks. Who gets pushback? Who gets ignored? If your top women aren’t visible in shaping bets—you’re scaling without their conviction. That’s long-term fragility.

4. Build a Retrospective Loop on Exits

Every woman who leaves should trigger a structural retro. Not just exit interviews. A systems-level review:
What role clarity, team rituals, escalation paths, or manager bandwidth failed?

If exits don’t change systems, they’re just churn.

Companies that get this right don’t just “retain” women. They grow with them. Their boards reflect operating power. Their strategy sessions include dissent. Their promotions feel earned—not mysterious. More importantly, their systems don’t require women to assimilate into dominant norms. They allow difference to lead.

You see new leadership templates emerge:
The quiet cross-functional PM. The empathetic engineering manager. The marketing head who scales through influence, not volume.

When your system rewards only one leadership archetype, you’re not just excluding people—you’re limiting your future playbook.

Ditch the vanity metrics. Track friction patterns.

• Who gets looped into early-stage decisions?
• Who has to prove themselves twice for the same role?
• Who’s invisible in retros, even when they built the delivery system?

Inclusion isn’t a value to believe in. It’s a friction pattern to resolve.

Start measuring participation velocity—not just completion. Who gets early visibility into shifting goals? Who speaks in meetings and actually gets their ideas carried forward? Who’s expected to “earn trust” repeatedly, versus assumed to have it by default?

If you want diagnostic clarity, track:

• Escalation equality – Who escalates issues and gets heard without fallout?
• Mentorship bandwidth – Who gets informal coaching or access to sponsors?
• Decision exposure – Who’s invited into pre-decision loops, not just execution reviews?

And be honest: if your female team members only feel empowered when you're personally involved, your system doesn’t scale. It defers fairness—it doesn’t embed it. The goal isn’t to eliminate bias overnight. It’s to create a feedback-resilient system that surfaces it, routes it, and fixes it without needing heroics. Because if inclusion depends on you remembering—it’s already failing. Track the gaps. Build the guardrails. Let the system carry the intent.

Here’s what I’d tell every founder in my cohort:

If your team only works when you’re moderating every meeting, you haven’t built inclusion—you’ve built dependence. If women leave and you’re surprised, you weren’t listening. If you think the absence of complaints means the system works—you’re delusional. Inclusion that scales isn’t loud. It’s consistent. It shows up in systems that don’t just make room—but share power.

You can’t fix what you won’t measure. And you can’t measure what you won’t name. So here’s what to ask:

• Would a mid-level woman on your team know how to get promoted—without guessing?
• Does your culture reward dissent when it comes from someone outside the inner circle?
• Are your top contributors shaping the roadmap—or just cleaning it up after the fact?

If the answer is no, you’re not behind—you’re at risk. You’re scaling fragility under the banner of progress. And fragility doesn’t show up in QBRs. It shows up when the people with leverage quietly check out. Or worse, stay silent until it’s too late to course-correct.

So build systems that don’t rely on vigilance. Build ones that work—especially when you’re not in the room. And if you’re still not sure where to start?

Track who gets to say no.