For those unfamiliar with the story, Holmes dropped out of Stanford University to found medical diagnostics company Theranos in 2004, as a 19-year-old. The company purported to be able to run hundreds of tests from minuscule amounts of blood with an innovative device that required just a few drops of blood pricked from the finger.
Holmes attracted nearly $US1bn of investment across a 10-year period, no doubt helped by the fawning media attention she received. At its height Theranos was valued at $US9bn, and Holmes was lauded as the richest and youngest self-made woman in the US. American elite culture desperately wanted a female Steve Jobs. So it got one. The problem was that her product didn’t work.
In 2014, Fortune magazine ran a cover story about Holmes with the title “This CEO’s Out for Blood”. For the article, Holmes told Roger Parloff that her products could run 200 tests with just one drop of blood, a claim that was not true. Normally a shrewd investigative reporter, Parloff was bedazzled by the entrepreneur’s charisma, failing to ask the difficult questions that would test her puffed-up claims.
Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett reflected: “If Holmes had been just another Silicon Valley male geek touting a then-unproven medical innovation, she probably would not have graced the cover of Forbes magazine … while we need to decry sexist discrimination, we also need to recognise that the rarity of women (in tech) sometimes has the opposite ‘halo’ effect: they can be excessively glamorised and/or praised …”
What Tett describes is an inversion of the sexism usually attributed to so-called patriarchy. While the familiar narrative is that women, especially young women, face barriers in the business world (which may be true in many cases), the opposite was the case for Holmes. The red carpet was rolled out for her as if she were a Hollywood starlet.
Some of the most powerful men in the world sat on the Theranos board, including George Shultz (former US secretary of state), William Perry (former US defence secretary), Henry Kissinger (former US secretary of state), Sam Nunn (former US senator) and Jim Mattis (former US Marine Corps four-star general and later US defence secretary).
In retrospect, it was a red flag that the board consisted entirely of military men and political powerbrokers as opposed to technical experts and medical practitioners.
Nevertheless, the fact so many powerful men placed their trust in a 20-something female entrepreneur with no prior business experience and no medical qualifications contradicts the oft-repeated tropes about the barriers women face in the business world.
Erin Edeiken, who produced the 2019 HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, which chronicles the rise and fall of Theranos, has said: “You can’t avoid the topic of gender with this story because it was very much a part of her meteoric rise to fame and success. She definitely used her gender to her advantage in building her story and her own myths – I think she then used her gender as an excuse (as) to why the spotlight was put on her when it all fell apart.”
A striking detail reported by John Carreyrou in The Wall Street Journal was the trust Shultz put in Holmes above his own grandson, Tyler Shultz, a Theranos employee turned whistleblower. After working for the company for eight months, Tyler Shultz learned enough about the sloppy and deceptive practices there to feel worried. He alerted federal regulatory authorities to the fact Theranos was doctoring its research and failing quality-control checks. He alerted his grandfather, too.
But rather than his grandfather taking an interest in his discovery and his courage in raising the alarm, Tyler Shultz essentially was disowned. George Shultz stopped talking to Tyler, and when the grandfather held his 95th birthday party Holmes was invited while the grandson was not. Incredibly, while visiting his grandfather’s house, Tyler Shultz was even ambushed by Theranos lawyers who served him a restraining order. Only when criminal charges were finally brought against the company did George Shultz realise he had made a mistake and that his grandson had been right all along.
This is not what you would expect to happen if making predictions from feminist theory or the bulk of US media coverage on women in tech. The conventional wisdom is that the tech industry is biased against women because women have not yet achieved 50 per cent parity within engineering jobs and in corporate leadership. An entire cottage industry has grown out of the sexism-in-tech narrative, with best-selling books and publications such as The Atlantic, The New Yorker and The New York Times all bemoaning the tech industry’s “gender discrimination problem”.
Yet the truth is that the disparity between men and women in business and technology cannot be chalked up to a single variable. While sexism no doubt plays a role, I suspect it plays a much smaller role than many believe.
All sorts of factors play a role in occupational choice, from intrinsic interest and motivation, to personality and the desire for particular work arrangements. For example, fewer men than women choose paediatrics or clinical psychology for their career path. But we don’t automatically assume sexism is the cause.
While the trial wraps up, Jennifer Lawrence is set to play the role of Holmes in a Hollywood production of Bad Blood, a film about the rise and fall of the female entrepreneur. Some have speculated that Holmes’s notoriety will make it harder for young women to gain the trust of investors, journalists and the public in the future. But I doubt it. Societies such as the US, Australia and many others have come too far and have had too many successful women in business technology and other fields for one case to puncture the acceptance of, and confidence in women’s abilities.
Exceptional women will always succeed, just as exceptional men do. We just have to remember that, like men, women too can be exceptional at fraud.
Claire Lehmann is founding editor of Quillette.
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