Yes. I couldn’t agree more. I just read Alexia Tsotsis’ Stop Telling Women Not To Do Startups on TechCrunch. The key moment:

Because nothing says link bait like “taking on a controversial topic” stupidly, using gross generalizations. The latest in this series is a post by Penelope Trunk, who is either a master at extrapolation or seems to have seriously conflated the word “women” with “Penelope Trunk.” I remember being a young TechCruncher reading her first post, “Women Don’t Want To Run Startups Because They’d Rather Have Children” and thinking, “Wow, this seems deliberate.”

The trouble with link bait like that, as Alexia points out, is that people read it, believe it, and use it, oftentimes use it against a good cause. It becomes justification. Rationalization. Reinforcement.

And I like her conclusion, too:

And here’s a piece of advice to women (or any other minority) in tech — Every time you get worked up over a dumb blog post, you’re wasting time that you could have spent building a world-changing company, writing your own blog post and/or proving pundits like Penelope Trunk wrong. And that starts with voting with your feet (or pen even).

So go, prove her wrong. Because a) This needs to stop b) The future depends on it.

Agreed.

(Image: from the TechCrunch post)