“The Female Founder” is a gruesome short story that begins, uncannily, in the manner of an Architectural Digest tour. In it, a film crew moves cautiously, and with increasing bewilderment, through what seems to be an evil fun house of corporate feminism, its mirrors shaped like Michelle Obama.
The titular founder, clearly image-obsessed, speaks either in perfect press release or offers lovely but empty overtures to the group of strangers: “My home is your home, you should all come to my next women in tech dim sum!” The plot turns on the discovery of a basement, which is actually a sweatshop staffed by “20-something” women with “cracked, bleeding” hands. The founder announces, “Meet my all-female team!”
