The profit maximizing way for him to move forward is to quietly take the possibility of pregnancy into account with future investments.

Not saying offensive things loudly is a good start, but if you want to maximize being a decent human being you should also not discriminate against women quietly -- or at all.

Specifically, you use the word "bad things to say". Are you arguing that they are incorrect? Or are you simply arguing that they are correct, but admitting their correctness somehow makes you a bad person?

If VCs are obligated to make suboptimal investment decisions (e.g., investing in founders who are less dedicated to the company but have breasts), who else is? Is Joe 401k also a bad human being if he attempts to maximize his returns and doesn't throw his money after feel-good causes?

I've never met a good programmer who liked office politics. We might laugh at the Foosball table, but it's a secret indicator hinting the workplace is low on office politics.

I would be richer if I stole all your stuff, sold it on eBay, and executed a cunning cover-up to make it look like you destroyed it yourself in a failed attempt at insurance fraud.

That's a true fact. How would you feel if I seriously proposed it at a business meeting? Being an asshole does not magically become okay if it makes you more money.

I will think much less of someone who is sexist, whether they express those views softly or loudly. If you can't see why, I'm afraid I don't know what else to say.

That will enable you to go beyond repeating slogans and implying those who disagree with you are assholes while completely dodging their questions.

Discriminating against someone based on their gender is both wrong and, in my opinion, based on fundamentally incorrect assumptions and flawed logic.

I'm fine with disagreement, but I do feel like most misogynists are assholes, yes.

(And if Joe 401k went through his portfolio and divested from female-run or minority-run businesses because he thinks people in those groups are worse leaders, then that suggests to me he might be an asshole, yes.)

To get to the question I think you are trying to raise, it does seem like gender has a non-zero effect on this influence. Even ignoring the fact that, for likely cultural reasons, mothers tend to spend more time with their children, being pregnant itself presents something of a (short term) barrier. Again, it should be quiet possible to overcome this barrier, but not by pretending it does not exist.

Undoubtedly, one could make a case that being a parent is actually a benefit towards being a successful founder.

I don't think men's inability to feed infants is cultural.

This is a tricky area of ethics though. Ideally everyone would have equal opportunity to do anything they want to do, including start a company and/or have a family. It is generally culturally accepted that it would be unfair for one's marital or parental status to have an effect on their career prospects. And I agree that that's a noble ideal. But imagine you're an investor with two hypothetical identical investments to choose from. They are identical in every way except that you know one of the founders is single and plans to remain so at least while getting the company off the ground, and the other is a parent with six children (to use an extreme example). It seems reasonable to expect that the former would be more likely to succeed, all else being equal. As much as you would like both to have equal opportunities, is it fair to force you to ignore this piece of evidence when making your choice? (What if you're investing others' money and have a fiduciary responsibility?)

There are two conflicting ideals here as I see it, and no perfect way to reconcile them fairly.

At least with my hypothetical above, you could say that the "family founder" chose to make family a priority, so in some way it is fair that they sacrifice some potential to receive investment in their startup. Even if we accept that though, it gets trickier if you instead consider male and female founders, both planning to have families. For simple biological reasons, even aside from cultural ones, the female time will probably have less time to focus on the startup, to some extent at least, but obviously she didn't choose to be female. So again you have this conflict, where we would certainly like to treat everyone equally, especially in areas they have no control over, but at the same time it is unfair to force people to make less optimal investments all else being equal.

You could draw parallels to favoring more attractive applicants to hospitality jobs, or even more intelligent applicants to programming jobs say. You don't control your intelligence, so it's not really fair that it affects your prospects. On the other hand, it's certainly not fair to force an employer to hire a less intelligent applicant. It seems like the general rule in cases like this is that if the difference materially affects a one's ability to do the job, generally it is ok to 'discriminate' based on it. So it's ok to discriminate based on weight or skin colour for an actor, but obviously not for a programmer. The contentious areas seem to be ones where the (potential) impact on performance is less direct. The parenthood debate would seem to fall under that category. A more obvious one would be something like physical appearance of waiters and waitresses. It's not as clear cut as an actor, where it's obvious that matching the part matters, but at the same time it's fairly obvious that having attractive waitstaff could be beneficial for a restaurant.

It seems to me that the average societal reaction in these grey areas is a sort of subconscious group decision that the benefits to one side outweigh the detriments to the other. So if we say it's wrong to discriminate based on parental status, what we're really saying is that we as a society value parenthood sufficiently that it takes precedence to some extent over other rights. These kinds of tradeoffs are made all the time; for example, we value free speech sufficiently that in many cases we allow it to override people's right not to be subjected to material they find objectionable. We value a basic standard of living such that we 'forcibly' deprive wealthier members of society of their property (via taxes) in order to redistribute a portion of it to the less fortunate. (In fact, we force people to contribute to many things that they may not personally support via taxes.)

Anyway, this ended up being far more than I had planned to write, but I guess my basic point is that few things are black and white. Usually some sort of compromise is necessary, and the goal is to find the one that best matches our societal values. Often our instinctive reactions to these grey areas are representative of a personal or societal value that we haven't fully consciously expressed.

Are you sure this is an ideal? Michael Jordan and I don't have equal opportunity in sports. Richard Feynman and I wouldn't have equal opportunity in winning a Nobel Prize. Jude Law and I don't have an equal opportunity to be nominated for academy awards.

How do you actually make us equal in sports? I could train for years, and even take steroids, but even then, the only way I could match Jordan is if someone were to come along and break all of his arms and legs.

Or take Feynman. I loved calculus and physics in college. But I'm just not even near the level of many of the TAs and professors that taught me, let alone a genius that wins prizes. In order for me to have true equal opportunity with someone at Feynman's level, you'd have to put him in a drug-induced coma for several days of the week, lest he think about physics.

I'm not going to belabor the point with Jude Law, except to say that maybe we'd be equal if I got plastic surgery, and his face was badly injured in a car accident.

So as far as I understand it, we are all different. Some of us are better at or more suited to some things than others. There's no way to lift everyone up to the same height as the best person in a field, so equality in practice has to involve cutting down achievers. Is that really ideal?

NB: When I say "equality," I'm not talking about equality before the law, which is something I'm completely in favor of. Here I'm talking about equality in ethics - the kind of thing that philosophers (such as John Rawls) get into.

My point was that we need to recognize these situations where our ideals conflict, so that we can decide what balance we prefer. It seems like by accepting 'discrimination' based on intelligence or athletic ability, we are recognizing that the value of having the most skilled people doing certain jobs outweighs the unfairness to the less skilled applicants, who may work just as hard, but have no control over their innate characteristics. On the other hand, while it may be true that a person with a family has less time or energy to devote to work than a single person, or a male with a baby has more time than a female with a baby, we have decided that gender equality and the right to have a family outweigh the unfairness to the investor who would ideally take all information into account when choosing an investment. I think that's totally reasonable, but it is helpful to recognize that that is what we're doing, rather than simply making statements like "sexism is wrong", without thinking about it any further. (Because we will eventually run into a situation where our initial reaction doesn't turn out to match with our core values, and it would be good to recognize and correct that.)

Isn't this post-pregnancy? Isn't the father in the same boat here?