How to deal with employees taking the piss in a distributed team setup

I'm the founder of a small tech startup and have been surprised to repeatedly run into the problem of employees I've hired completely taking advantage of our distributed team setup to just... not do any work. It's baffling to me because our team is so small, only ~5 people, that there's no way to hide a complete lack of productivity. Plus we have team-wide, publicly visible goal tracking week on week, and daily Slack standups; and these employees, one after another (I've had to move quickly to fire), somehow seem to think it's ok to continually defer goals and show no progress. I suspect part of it has to do with the fact that it's a distributed setup and there's less accountability. Another part of it might be that I'm a woman and there's some subconscious resistance from these men to having a female boss. I've only had issues with men. All the women I've worked with have been absolutely fantastic, very responsible, highly competent. Any suggestions on how to hire better? how to manage better? how to set up team process / checkins better?