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b_b  ·  3483 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: It's a White Man's Internet

And not just better attention to detail, but a wholly different perspective.

I'm working on forming a company right now, and we needed some help with a particular aspect. One of the guys suggested a woman he knows who had expertise in the particular area (nothing related to any gender specific knowledge), so we consulted her. She was into our idea, so we brought her in as a partner.

I never considered her "a woman", but rather "an expert" (which I still figure is a decent default in business). But then we were having dinner the other day, and discussing marketing strategies. We were discussing potential customers, and our limited capacity to imagine things beyond our experience was laser focusing the few of us dudes on guys just like us. She spoke up and said, "Wow, I have a totally different idea of who would be interested," and proceeded to expand our potential customer base by an order of magnitude, specifically because she was thinking from a woman's perspective. Big lesson on my end.