I once met with an investor who asked me a question I was not expecting.
Who would run the business when I had a baby?
Not how I had built the company, managed risk or assembled the team around me. Not if I even wanted children. Not whether I had plans to start a family.
The question assumed that a baby was coming, that I would be the parent whose career would be disrupted and that my business would somehow become leaderless as a result.
My husband was spared the same scrutiny.
In fact, every question directed at him was about the technology itself. The product. The engineering. The business.
Which was interesting. Because I’m the one who designed it and I’m the CEO.
I’ll never forget that moment and the question because it exposed something women in technology and entrepreneurship know all too well. We’re not just judged on the businesses we’re building, we’re judged on the lives people imagine we might build, too.
I moved to Australia from Delhi in 2013 to study electrical and electronics engineering at the University of Adelaide. I was one of only four women in a graduating class of around 100.
After university, I spent almost five years at Motorola Solutions, working on public safety communication networks used by police, ambulance and fire services. I worked on complex infrastructure, travelled to sites and helped design systems on which communities and emergency workers depended.
Later, I founded Chefadora, an AI powered global food platform that now reaches more than 100,000 monthly active users across almost 180 countries.
The original idea was inspired by my mum. During the pandemic, I was separated from my mum and missing her cooking. Her recipes came to me through voice messages, handwritten notes and memory. Some were difficult to follow, others had never been written down at all.
What began as a way to preserve my mum’s recipes grew into a platform designed to help people publish, discover and earn income from their recipes, while preserving the cultural knowledge and family stories that live inside food.
Building the company has required every skill I developed as an engineer. It has involved product development, technical decisions, user research, hiring, marketing, strategy and years of solving problems that did not have obvious answers.
Yet, like many many female founders before me, I have occasionally found myself in rooms where the conversation shifts away from the company and towards questions about whether my gender, family life or future motherhood might limit what I can build.
Often these questions sound well-meaning. Practical, even. Who will take over? Are you sure you want to take on something this demanding? How will you balance everything? Can you really scale this and have a family?
Sensible questions. Except for one thing: they’re not questions men are routinely asked.
Collectively, they reveal a bias so ingrained we barely notice it. There is this assumption that a woman’s ambition has an expiry date. That her commitment might waver. That at some point, something else will become more important.
And of course, it might. In fact, for most founders, at some point, it probably will. Because life happens, priorities change, parents get older and need us more, kids get sick, we get sick, or something might happen overnight that suddenly matters more than whatever was sitting at the top of that day’s to-do list. Ambition doesn’t necessarily disappear, but sometimes it changes shape. That’s life. And it’s certainly not unique to women.
We should be able to have honest conversations about parenting and entrepreneurship. Running a startup is demanding. Raising children is demanding. Combining the two requires support, systems and compromise. But this is true for mothers and fathers.
What isn’t normal, or acceptable, is factoring that possibility into our assessment of a female founder’s potential before any of it has even happened, while treating a male founder’s family life as irrelevant.
These questions also misunderstand what good leadership looks like in 2026. A business that can only operate when its founder is personally available every hour of every day is not resilient or sustainable. The goal of any serious founder should be to build capable teams, strong systems and clear decision making structures. Questions about succession, operational risk and leadership depth are entirely valid. But they should be asked of every founder.
Female founders already operate in an environment where we frequently have to provide more evidence before being seen as credible. We are often encouraged to prove traction before seeking investment, while our male counterparts are backed on vision and potential. Confidence in a man can be interpreted as leadership. The same confidence in a woman can be read as arrogance. A male founder may be described as focused. A woman behaving the same way may be considered difficult or inflexible. These biases are not always conscious, but they shape who receives capital, introductions, opportunities and the benefit of the doubt. They also create an impossible standard.
The question should not be whether a woman remains investable after having a child. The question should be whether we are building a startup ecosystem that recognises founders as whole people and expects all parents to share responsibility.
I do not know exactly what every stage of my future life will look like. No founder does.
What I do know is that I have already moved countries, built a career in a male dominated profession, worked on critical public safety infrastructure and created a global technology company from an idea inspired by my mother’s recipes. I have navigated uncertainty every step of the way. That is what founders do.
So, the next time an investor feels compelled to ask a female founder who will run the business when she has a baby, I hope they pause and ask themselves a different question.
Have I asked the male founders I invest in this question too?
And if the answer is no, perhaps there are better questions to ask.
Have you built a company that can operate without you? Have you surrounded yourself with people who can lead? Have you built the systems, structures and culture that allow this business to grow beyond any one person? And, most importantly, do I believe you have the capability, ambition and resilience to build what you say you’re going to build?
Those are questions worth asking.
Ask them of me. Ask them of my husband. Ask them of every founder.
Just don’t ask me to account for a hypothetical baby before you’ve finished asking me about the very real business I’ve already built.
And if the answer is no, perhaps the risk they have identified is not in the business.
Perhaps it is in the way they are assessing its founder.