"[Haney] spoke to me like I was in an abusive relationship," an anonymous former employee told Buzzfeed News. "Each day I walked into that office I felt more and more worthless. She had beaten me down, like she had done to many others." For her part, Haneywrote on Instagram, "There is an unsettling trend lately to interview ex-employees of female-founded companies and report their claims either at face value or without any context." (According to Buzzfeed, writer Brianna Sacks spoke with over 20 current and former employees and viewed Slack messages, documents, emails, and texts that legitimate their claims.)
Indeed, in December, The Verge published a similar expose about suitcase company Away, leveling accusations that co-founder Stephanie Korey bullied workers via Slack, forced them to work long hours, and, on at least one occasion, referred to her employees as "millennial twats." In 2017, Miki Agrawal, founder of period underwear company Thinx, was accused in a report by The Cut of sexually harassing and fat-shaming employees and creating a culture of embarrassment. While these might seem like disparate tales of a few mismanaged companies, remember that for every one of these stories that is published, scores of instances of workplace abuse go unreported.
This public desire for women executives to be perfect has not gone unnoticed by other women execs. "I am soooo done with the takedown of the visionary female founder story. Next! Let's try to understand the context behind the story and cover the positive alongside the critique," tweeted Rent The Runway founder Jenn Hyman. Business Insider reports that fellow female start-up founders like Glossier's Emily Weiss, The Wing's Audrey Gelman, and Away's co-founder Jen Rubio have rallied around Haney, leaving supportive messages on her Instagram. Gelman also recently penned a story for Fast Company outlining some of the times she has gotten it wrong as a leader, perhaps attempting to preemptively address potential criticisms, like that the company has a diversity problem.
Of course, it's not just female founders who have been accused of workplace misconduct. Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was accused of sexual misconduct and cultivating a sexist "bro" culture at the company. WeWork's Adam Neumann has been accused of pushing employees to their breaking point, and, according to Vanity Fair, acting less like a CEO and more like a cult leader. But of the 134 US-based "unicorn" companies, just 14 have a woman as a founder, co-founder, or CEO. (Among them are Glossier, Rent The Runway, 23AndMe, and Houzz.) There's an understandable desire to protect these women. We want to cultivate female leadership and inspire young women to pursue business, a world that's still largely dominated by middle-aged white men.
Female leaders are still perceived differently - both within and outside of the companies they helm - than their male counterparts might be. A 2019 study from University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce, recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, created fictional news articles about a fictional company, randomly changing the CEO's name from "Adam" to "Abigail" in half of them. The gender of this fictional CEO made a significant difference in how respondents reacted to the articles.
And yet, dismay at hearing that CEOs threaten and bully their employees isn't a gender issue - it's more about the realization that these ostensibly mission-driven companies are nowhere near as progressive as they pretend to be. Part of the reason people buy Away suitcases and Outdoor Voices leggings is because they like the ethos of those brands. These consumers want to support something different and revolutionary - in as much as consumer goods can be those things.
As long as we're still participating in consumer culture, though, it's important to strive toward a goal of gender equality in the workplace. We still have a long way to go toward achieving that, and so seeing otherwise inspiring female founders called out isn't great for optics or morale. But we also need to protect workers - the ones who don't have money, fame, and an army of Instagram followers on their side. If female-helmed start-ups want to ensure they don't get dragged in the press, how about making sure things are as rosy on the inside of their companies as they project them to be on the outside?
Of course, nobody sets out to create a toxic company culture, and often, there isn't an easy Band-Aid one can apply to eradicate one, either. "It's hard for people to understand how difficult it is to be a founder, and also how... people are complicated," offers Buechler. "I am 100 percent confident that each of these female founders do have a component of their psychologies that are absolutely congruent with that aspirational vision they're putting forward. And who do we know that is 'all that'? People also have a shadow side, people struggle to have appropriate boundaries, or to manage their anger, or frustration, or stress. We expect people, especially women, to be these visionary leaders while forgetting their humanity."
Two years after the MeToo movement, it seems we're finally ready to have a reckoning about abusive behavior in the workplace that isn't of a sexual nature. It's bound to be difficult to call out someone who is abusing their power in a more insidious way, whose "shadow side" is tinted millennial pink. But we still have to do it, even when we'd rather not, even when we love their leggings and follow the founder on social media. Otherwise, all the progress we've made is going to seem as dated as buying a rose-gold suitcase.
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