Sam Joel was the founder and CEO of Givetree, a crypto charity platform, until he resigned yesterday, following a spate of offensive comments made to a number of women on LinkedIn. We know about Joel and his history because it has been well covered by the media (see here, here and here).
What has been missing in these reports though is what sparked the incident. A women’s story. Elaine Stead’s to be precise. Stead is a prominent figure in the Australian tech scene and had answered questions put to her by Capital Brief for our Q&A series, which was shared on Linkedin and to which Joel so violently responded.
The piece covered how Stead broke into VC after being head-hunted by a firm she had pitched to as a founder, that her PhD equipped her with the necessary skills to be a VC, and that she has moved through the public scrutiny she faced following the collapse of BlueSky as best she could and has worked hard to re-establish herself. She thinks the government has a role to play in the innovation sector, has faith in minister Ed Husic, and she is particularly excited about Australian startup Synchron.
But in all the kerfuffle surrounding Joel, Stead’s story was erased.
Women in tech have been erased for as long as we’ve been here — that is, since the beginning. It happens in ways that do incredible harm in the fight for equality, which are often more subtle and harmful than we are willing to acknowledge because they poke at complex and difficult things we need to fix — and often don’t make headlines.
