Are we really killing it?

Is this my battle? I said in a conversation with a feminist (but male) editor who had asked my opinion on a “clickbait article” that had generated an inordinate amount of negative attention on women who happen to be in tech. As I commented under a post on LinkedIn, Women are ‘killing it’. But was that really saying enough? Apparently, it should be my battle. Because I’m a woman. Ok… So let’s take a closer look, then.

The article in question was a short piece by a respected senior reporter and investigations lead at the FT-backed Sifted, a leading technology publication that has been criticised in some circles by some for not covering “enough” women in its fundraising news, league tables, and podcasts. Freya Pratty’s piece proclaiming Europe’s tech-bro renaissance is upon us. Sigh had gone viral, and I was asked if this was just vibes on a much bigger topic that Pathfounders, for example, later attempted to address with evidence. I examined the attacks from all quarters of a growing community of male sympathisers, and realised that the allegation that Sifted’s coverage sometimes displays a latent, pro-female ‘sexism’ of its own making (as some critics have argued) had raised many new cultural questions that hadn’t been adequately addressed.

What are our expectations of female-led businesses? Must they be female-first in their mission if the product they have developed has a majority male customer base? Sifted itself, which claims 120,000 daily readers, is a female-led business in its own right. And which, arguably, has a male-dominated audience (although a gender breakdown of its readership has not been made public). Despite this, the publication has extensively covered stories about a gender pay-gap at startups, and in a 2025 survey, it generated 227 responses from women alone, suggesting a notable female readership. Pratty also recently highlighted that the editorial team at Sifted is “overwhelmingly female […] Almost all of our leadership team are women. This matters to all of us — personally, and professionally.” Samantha Niblett, member of Parliament in the UK for South Derbyshire, and who has worked extensively on promoting women in tech and investing in female founders, also noted in a post on LinkedIn that nine of the thirteen external guests on Sifted’s podcast in the last six months were women. Indeed, she added, all its external guests have been women since the start of 2026. Meanwhile, Pratty had previously stated that 137 of 144 episodes on Harry Stebbings’ podcast, 20VC, over the past year have only featured men. These are the facts.

Our Great Expectations

When a heated debate ensued where a founder and podcaster, Seb Johnson, argued Sifted should work harder to champion women before tearing down other media, such as the 20VC podcast, the debate took an unexpectedly gendered and (dare I say?) outdated turn. Not least because Johnson had slammed Sifted himself, but because it seems that he had just taken to a calculator to compare, rather arbitrarily, some female-first outputs by both media. Not only had his number crunching disregarded time as a key factor, but he hadn’t compared qualitatively similar products. His intuition was mocked by Niblett, who responded prolifically in the comments, armed with numbers and facts and with a dry sense of humour that, in women, is sometimes called aggression; a situation that Johnson might have avoided had he taken just a moment to breathe, after reading Pratty’s piece. Perhaps he could have conducted five whole minutes of research to chart comparable stats along an x-axis corresponding to ‘t’ that modelled his assumptions more like an economist, or a social scientist or, ok, let’s cut him some slack: like a tech entrepreneur preparing an investor deck, at the very least. The debate on Pratty’s piece might have reached new heights along the y-axis to reveal the why and the ‘y’, at once. Just imagine. But alas, calculators are a boyz best friend – give or take an AI.

Johnson’s take generated enormous support across the eponymous social media platform X with 10.4K views and 17 comments. An additional defensive comment in response to Niblett’s scathing take on LinkedIn about his position even generated more likes (238) than her original post (153). This was a “backlash” which Pratty argued had “proven the points [her original article had] raised”.

Meanwhile, I wondered about “viral” as a word. It isn’t just a perception of a trend. It’s an odd sort of judgment that all amplification has its roots in disease.

The Ineffable ‘Why’?

Whatever our perspective on the maths, the two-pronged question remains whether Sifted should be championing more women as Johnson had implied, and why exactly? Just to clarify for those with a penchant for mansplaining that has also worn off on me (apologies), I’m not implying that women shouldn’t champion women, nor am I trivially asking well, why should they? I’m saying, why exactly, based on pure logic and reason, should they?

Johnson’s position on this, or his expectation, maybe, reveals a hidden gender bias lurking behind his calculator that disregards the basics of product-market-fit, or PMF as it’s often abbreviated in tech circles. In layman’s terms, PMF is the principle that a company should have a product that fits the largest segment (ideally) of its target market.

I wanted to be more exacting. I wondered: is a female-led business (Sifted) not permitted to cater for a majority male audience for the sake its product-market-fit? And if not, who exactly should give that permission? The user base of social media platform X, for instance, is heavily skewed towards men since its groundbreaking rebrand from Twitter some years ago (X has 63% male users, as of 2026). The platform has even justified the emergence of the manosphere, which it may have helped catalyse by repeating its overarching corporate policy to promote its version of ‘freedom of speech’. Hypocrisy (an accusation levelled by Johnson against Sifted) is a scathing attack on any publication, whether slammed by a man or a woman, so it’s really no wonder so many chimed in on this particular debate around Pratty’s piece. But does the charge stick?

Even if we were to punch the numbers into a calculator or AI, as Johnson did, to justify his assumption about Sifted’s “hypocrisy”, Pratty’s piece illustrates that Sifted upholds feminist values. Is that its corporate policy speaking? Its editorial direction? Or just Pratty’s freedom of speech? Meta (the artist formerly known as Facebook) maintains anti-modern-slavery and human trafficking policies despite countless investigations over the last three years into breaching its own policies. So, this raises two new cultural questions: why is Pratty/Sifted expected to be an apologist for feminism, broadly speaking? And, from a pure business standpoint, why exactly should Sifted be held accountable to a different standard than Meta or X, for example?

Perhaps this expectation is where the real problem lies.

On Values: Ethics, or Bias?

Psychologists state that expectations are rooted, at best, in ethics, and at worst in cognitive biases. They are moralising stances. Sometimes they’re fair, sometimes they’re not. So, one, two, three. Four additional questions that Johnson’s expectations raise are, firstly, is it right to defy your own corporate policy for the sake of freedom of speech or product market fit? Tough one. Secondly, is it right to have such policies in the first place if they run counter to PMF and contradict business growth strategy? Twitter was working better before it became X in terms of user acquisition and growth for at least 20 years least, if I recall correctly. Thirdly, is it enough to publish a decent policy only to spit out some data that can be cut in any way to justify an argument irrespective of business practice on standard measurement parameters of comparable values? Fourthly, should business practice be ‘best practice’, or is there always some room to manoeuvre your way out of it to match your intuition (or hunch, when it doesn’t emerge from a women)? If the answer to any, or all, of these questions is ‘No’ then Sifted, alongside X, Meta, 20VC, Johnson’s own show, and other “media” need to be held equally to account on the same parameters. That’s the logic, isn’t it?

On Culture: Hype, or Amplification?

The reality is that this debate isn’t about numbers or policies, nor even about gender. This is about the slow martyrdom of feminists of all genders amid the rise of a competing cultural phenomenon described recently by Pathfounders as brosculinity (perhaps shorthand for a sort of ‘toxic masculinity’ in a tech setting). It encompasses multiple movements that have earned a variety of labels – from the bro-renaissance to Carole Cadwalldr’s broligarchy; and from Louis Theroux’s manosphere to Pratty’s ‘bro-ity’, amid a host of other bro-spasms triggered by a shifting political landscape.

Meanwhile, I’m the first to flag that there have been parallel critical movements exploring dangerous cognitive biases within feminist debate, itself, such as being a Karen. But for this piece, let’s stick to brosculinity — a cultural phenomenon that extends far beyond misogyny. Brosculinity, as I see it, not only forgives bigotry but champions it, feeds it, and consumes it raw. As varying reactions to the Epstein files have illustrated, brosculinity isn’t just a male feature. It is perhaps the result of a much larger trend that reaches beyond the tech industry and might have naive interpretations of religious parables to blame. Something that tech titan Peter Thiel – a self-ascribed “small-o orthodox Christian” — has jumped on with lustful fervour.

On Beliefs: Justice, or Fairness?

Michelangelo’s famous sculpture La Pietà (pictured above) frames Jesus as a victim beyond the saviour, with a stoic (if a bit stiff-looking) Mother Mary holding him in her arms, enveloped in her robes. It is plain to see, and yet largely unexplored, that Mother Mary is the real martyr in this depiction. Historians have even commented that Michelangelo was famously bad at sculpting women. But that’s not the point. The facts are that women in tech and big industry have been building some of the most important technologies for the benefit of all society throughout history.

Besides the institution of Abrahamic religions birthed by Mother Mary, Ada Lovelace was the world’s first computer programmer, while Radia Perlman invented internet infrastructure, and Hedi Lamarr invented wireless communication. One might even argue that Mary Wilkes, rather than Steve Jobs, was the first to build a personal computer. And it’s thanks to Margaret Hamilton (who invented space exploration software) that we’ve been able to get up there in the black abyss contemplating the stars, or launching WIFI satellites, you pick your reference. It was Stephanie Kwolek (inventor of Kevlar, the material of bullet-proof vests) who might have been our saviour in war, and Rosalind Franklin (who discovered DNA) who’s been our saviour in peace.

And last, but certainly not least, we could draw a single trend line between the point of Grace Hopper’s invention of COBOL (which translates human language into machine code) to Mira Murati’s (arguably) co-invention of ChatGPT to mark out the trajectory of technological innovation that has fundamentally shifted our human experience today. So unknown are all these women that a new WikiProject is in development to reclaim the estates left behind by the great women of history. Displaced characters denigrated to the position of muse in our collective memory, if not forgotten altogether in the muddle (and coercive primacy) of an age-old brosculinity that’s riding a new hype cycle today.

As with all hype cycles, Pratty’s last interviewee sighed and said it best, suggesting we should all just ignore it. A point made by this publication (Pathfounders), which concurred with its recent article and podcast.

But. And here’s the ‘but’.

Haven’t women been ignoring it for over 2000 years? Rising above. Rolling up our sleeves and getting on with birthing, propagating and inventing? Sometimes, even, letting men take the credit for our ideas, or humbly conceding our inventions, including the words we’ve coined, to the good men in our networks? I want to rise above, because that matters to me for the sake of community, friendship, and picking the right battles. And yet, here we are again in the middle of a spat on social media between, effectively, two ‘feminists’ — Seb Johnson and Freya Pratty — who are meant to be on the same side. 

Coming back down to Earth

Is this really my battle? I asked myself again as I pulled together this essay. Should I let it go? What does it say about me as a woman to write this for a male, albeit feminist, editor of a tech publication? What expectation or bias would that reinforce? If I were to write this piece for Sifted instead, would that position this as being on the defensive? And if I write this piece at all, what should my tone of voice be? Straightforward, truthful and palatable for all genders in an attempt to elevate the discussion and shift the ground? Or subversive, critical, and rightfully wronged to promote awareness and justice, maybe? Pratty’s tone in her original article both resonated and frustrated me for these exact reasons. All these questions could have been raised, and yet where did we end up after a week of debate? Perhaps that is exactly why it triggered so many responses from so many measured and moderate women in her defence, including me. Some of us women might have preferred a piece about the male/female divide in the tech industry to be more considered, to avoid the risk of clickbait reactions and genuinely shift ground.

But shifting ground takes time, like the tremors before an earthquake. It arrives unannounced, but is foreboding. The difficulty is that seriousness from a woman doesn’t get eyeballs and is left largely ignored, especially on LinkedIn, where research has shown that measured, non-sensational, factual posts by women are deprioritised by the algorithm, not generating enough views, as well as LinkedIn would have it, had the same posts been published by men.

Sometimes, clickbait serves as the first tremor. Sifted’s piece did, in its deployment, prove its own point: that sexism is real. And trying to rise above it or ignore it, can even perpetuate it. This is a fact. Until recently (2019), safety measures in cars were not tested with the female anatomy in mind, resulting in vehicles being brought to market that do not guarantee the safety of women.

North Star

Brosculinity isn’t just about hurting women (and children). Online communities, dubbed the manosphere, have been hurting men, too. Feminist men, but also that cross-section of ill-informed men pressured to conform to a “bro” culture that doesn’t just belittle, but negates education, research, logic and truth itself. Louis Theroux’s recent documentary on the ‘manosphere’, and novels like the brilliantly observed and tongue-in-cheek Fuccboi by Sean Thor Conroe, expose the harms that brosculinity is having on society at large. And yet, so few people are discussing these two pieces of insightful content since the change in the US administration in early 2025. Have these pieces written by men also been downgraded by some algorithm? Or do they no longer hold captive the attention of an informed and fair audience that they once enjoyed? Are we changing culturally as well as politically?

So, no. It seems to me that the Pratty-Johnson debate is not my battle. It is our collective war beyond any gender differences. It is a Culture War that has gone on far too long. And we’ve all had enough, haven’t we? Isn’t it time to start killing it, together? Because I am not just a woman. I am more than just a woman. You, dear male reader, are not just a man. And we are no gods, either. But together we can aspire to be human, which is surely something greater than just ‘mankind’?

Sonia Afzal is a Global Communications Director; Founder; Board Member; Writer