Tech CEO Thinks Women Who Wear High Heels Don't Have a Brain
Yesterday evening at a demo day in Midtown, Jorge Cortell, the CEO of a healthcare startup and a self-described "hacker-hacktivist" took a creepshot of a female attendee's high heels and posted it his public Twitter account with the following caption: "Event supposed to be for entrepreneurs, VCs, but these heels (I've seen several like this)... WTF? #brainsnotrequired"
The event was a "reverse" demo day where respected venture capital firms like General Catalyst Partners, SoftBank, Bain Capital Partners, and Lerer Ventures pitched themselves to entrepreneurs.
Brainpower, it appears, was also conspicuously absent when Cortell tried to measure intellectual rigor by the bottom of woman's shoe. But when a fellow techie and one of his employees at Kanterson Systems, an open source healthcare software company, tried to call him on his gendered observation, Cortell offered a lobotomized defense.
@daveambrose not sexist. Logical. Perhaps a man was wearing those. Would be equally absurd. High heels are STUPID, bad for your health.
— Jorge Cortell (@jorgecortell) October 23, 2013
@juan_silta Self-harm means not too smart in my world
— Jorge Cortell (@jorgecortell) October 22, 2013
Just think, while the female entrepreneurs were listening to presentations wondering if this investor or that one would respect and support their idea, Cortell was hunched down, scanning the packed crowd for women's footwear choices, all in the name of logic. Hope Kanterson wasn't hoping for funding from Accel.
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