Aminatou Sow
Her post on Medium, which is an open letter to Andreessen, reveals a startling and sexist trend that has long plagued the tech scene — talented and capable women are often ignored and ostracized in the work place.
Her post starts out in a casual tone detailing her morning in a cafe before jumping into what seems like a coincidental observation:
“I ran into two women I know casually and one of them was lamenting the fact that you had recently blocked her on Twitter. ‘Man what a bummer,’ I said rather disingenuously and ran out not really trying to engage with anyone talking about technology humans on such a beautiful day.
“Fast forward a few minutes later, I’m at home catching up on morning Twitter as one does and I notice another woman I know is tweeting about being blocked by VCs and specifically people from your fund, Andreessen Horowitz.”
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Sow went to check Andreessen’s Twitter to discover that she too was blocked:
“Now my interest is piqued and I go to check your feed and of course you’ve blocked me. To be clear, to my knowledge we have never actually directly interacted on the platform before save a few tweets about our mutual appreciation of Mr. Robot.”
She goes on to detail that last year women made up less than 20% of the people that Andreessen himself followed on Twitter, despite trying to “#changetheratio.”
As far as Andreessen’s investment firm goes, only 7.5% of Andreessen Horowitz’s senior investment partners are women, and the firm scored very low on a recent diversity study.
Sow ended her post with a warning to Andreessen of the inevitability that women will one day be equal to men in the tech space — with or without his help:
“Don’t sleep on us, Marc. But we’ll be fine if you do.”
