Hard disagree. It wasn't the only thing, but it was so clear that all the fawning, uncritical media coverage and general buzz really "wanted a female Steve Jobs". And all the ways that Holmes emulated Jobs in style but not substance went along with that.

I'll give you another example that was about the same time, with much lower stakes, but it always really annoyed me. An entrepreneur, Grace Choi, launched the "Mink 3D makeup printer" at Tech crunch Disrupt in 2014. At the time, it was pretty clear to me that the device was an idea that wasn't functional yet, but there was tons of coverage at the time of how revolutionary this was, and also basically scoffing at the idea that the male-only TechCrunch judging panel couldn't possibly have any ability to evaluate the device, and any criticisms they had were obviously just sexism. Here is an example of a typical fawning article at the time: https://www.forbes.com/sites/deniserestauri/2014/06/30/a-har...

Now, Ms. Choi is not an Elizabeth Holmes, and from what I can tell it looks like she eventually got something functional (but honestly I can't tell how much) around 2019-2020. But she never "blew up" anything, I'm unable to tell if she ever had real deliveries, and her minkbeauty.com website looks to be defunct. I'm not blaming her for creating a product that failed, but moreso what she did create was a ton of uncritical coverage from the perspective of "She's a woman disrupting a world men don't understand!"

The world is now teeming with hucksters and fakers, and sure, while I'd guess the majority of those hucksters and fakers are likely men, whenever you create unspoken rules that "people of a certain sex/race/class aren't allowed to criticize because they don't have the 'lived experience'" then you obviously throw the door wide open to shysters who will take advantage of that.