alt Hacker News"female led" is only a selling point if women are underrepresented as founders, so it still circles back to whether or not the industry already had a pattern of sexism that made having a prominent female founder an outlier in the first place. I'm sure plenty of people will disagree, but I think it pretty clearly did.
Sexism is defined as prejudice or discrimination based on sex.
Prejudice means to form an opinion before the facts are in, but if the facts are there and support you, it is not prejudice.
Discrimination is fairly broad, but in this case can be summarized as preventing someone to get a job due to who they are as a person.
Having established what these words mean, I think it is difficult to entertain the idea that sexism played a role in women being underrepresented as founders in the 2020s. Also, as I have no data on this, I am not sure if the claim of underrepresentation is itself a prejudice or not.
How many women try and succeed? How many men try and succeed? I do not expect to have the percentage be vastly different in the last ten years.