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" Last week, Forbes published an anonymous, first-person story by a female tech entrepreneur entitled &amp;quot;What It&amp;#039;s Like Raising Money As a Woman in Silicon Valley.&amp;quot; The story quickly went viral, raising questions about the gender imbalance in the tech world and what needs to change to make sure that sexism didn&amp;#039;t go unchecked.  Michelle Lam, the founder of True&amp;amp;amp;Co, a brilliant online bra-shopping startup that&amp;#039;s sort of like Warby Parker for intimates, has experienced some situations like the one described in Forbes, but she also has some ideas about how to change the industry\u2013and our workplace culture at large. She spoke to Lilit Marcus about her reaction to the Forbes story and where she thinks we should go from here. I&amp;#039;ve been a master&amp;#039;s student, a strategy consultant, and an entrepreneur\u2014and everything is male dominated. Every single one of those industries has those stories. I have a wealth of experiences\u2013great interactions, interactions that could have come from a movie about sexual harassment. It&amp;#039;s not isolated to one industry or one power dynamic. It happens all the time.  What I would love to see is for the story to move beyond &amp;quot;he put his hand on my knee&amp;quot; cautionary tales. I want to see stories about what to do when that happens, because you have a split second to decide &amp;quot;is he a nice guy who&amp;#039;s misguided or a bad guy who has a history of doing this?&amp;quot; There are still people who think it&amp;#039;s OK to make sexist comments. Some guys still think it&amp;#039;s OK because they&amp;#039;re brought up that way, and you should educate them and help make them great partners. Everyone&amp;#039;s on a spectrum, and the severity of the response depends on where they are on the spectrum. Sometimes he needs to be set straight, sometimes other people need to know about it and hear about it. You can&amp;#039;t always take action right away. When I was working in investing [at Bain Capital] in 2004, we had a management team come pitch us at 6 PM on a Friday night, and the VP of a company asked me out on a date on speakerphone while he was drunk. My boss was standing there in shock. Kudos to my boss, he said something. I think the time has come for the conversation to move forward, not just share stories\u2014those are valuable to put out there, but we need ways to deal with it and get past it because it won&amp;#039;t go away anytime soon. I&amp;#039;m being pragmatic about it.  I did feel like I was in a unique position [to launch True&amp;amp;amp;Co]. I believe that my background made me the person who could speak to guys about bras and data and to women about building a modern brand in lingerie, which is one of the most emotionally fraught industries that you can possibly go into. The number of things that have happened since conception have been amazing. The first question was &amp;quot;why is this important?&amp;quot; which every founder faces\u2014making it relevant. It&amp;#039;s hard to make it relevant to the people who don&amp;#039;t wear the products. Lam and her business partner officially launched True&amp;amp;amp;Co at D10, an annual tech industry conference, in 2010.  At D10, people gave out panties in discreet white boxes. There were a number of gentlemen who threw the boxes across the room. They were 800 beautiful hand tied boxes\u2014I know! I tied them!\u2014nothing tawdry about it, and men threw them across the room. But women ran to pick them up. I&amp;#039;d say despite all the things that happened at D10 the women who rallied around us, that was incredibly gratifying. Sheryl Sandberg gave me a pep talk the night before I went up to present, and she gave me some savvy words about how to handle it. [Sexism is] often a bonding mechanism. It&amp;#039;s a way for women to connect with each other because it&amp;#039;s a shared experience. And it didn&amp;#039;t stop there. We still encounter challenges. I have an intern waiting to get back in the United States because the application has been dropped by certain sponsors because bras are considered a &amp;quot;vice&amp;quot; by the Department of State. I can&amp;#039;t find that list anywhere online, but people who get visa applications by the truckload every year are turning down intimate apparel. We have had our ads be rejected by Yahoo and by Outbrain because they contain the word &amp;quot;bra.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s astonishing to me that there&amp;#039;s a filter on that word when these are garments that 50 percent of the population wears every day. You walk down the subway and you see massive photos of photoshopped boobs staring at you in the face from retailers like Victoria&amp;#039;s Secret, but you can&amp;#039;t say the word &amp;quot;bra.&amp;quot; This isn&amp;#039;t just about female founders in the tech industry. It&amp;#039;s every industry. There&amp;#039;s a gender divide. We have to remember that and build bridges. [True&amp;amp;amp;Co&amp;#039;s] mission is clear: it&amp;#039;s for women. There are no men in [the ads] on or off camera. She&amp;#039;s not even thinking about him. She&amp;#039;s thinking about her day, her destiny. There&amp;#039;s a group of women who respond to that. I think it&amp;#039;s reflected in the people who come to my company. Related:  How I Stopped Being One of Those Women Who Couldn&amp;#039;t Drive  Related:  Racist Photo Sent in Wake of Sorority Rush at University of Alabama  Related:  Are Childfree Women the New Marketing Demographic?  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/tech/a14723/sexism-in-tech-is-real/>