In any debate, it is easy to revert to anecdote and highlight examples that exemplify one point of view. Recent TechCrunch posts about women in tech have done just that. The latest of these claimed that women don’t want to run startups, because they’d rather have children. I can understand why: TechCrunch and its editors focus on the Silicon Valley/Web 2.0 world. In this world, most startups—or at least those that get attention— are founded by young white males; aggression and arrogance are considered positive traits; companies need to be grown very fast—even recklessly—because markets change rapidly; and venture capitalists pay promising students to drop out of school to start companies that will likely fail and wreck their careers. So if you’re debating this tiny slice of the tech universe, it is fair to say that women and minorities can’t—or don’t want to—compete. But this isn’t representative of the larger tech world; and it certainly isn’t representative of American industry.
Take the issue of whether the desire to have kids or just run lifestyle businesses makes women averse to running startups. This is an accurate description of some women
: they just aren’t cut out for the rough-and-tumble world of entrepreneurship—which requires extremely hard work and in which most startups fail. But it’s the same with men: men too avoid entrepreneurship because they fear risk and aren’t ready to put in the long hours. There is no black or white: many women with children have succeeded with startups, while other successful women entrepreneurs have chosen not to have children.
My research team systematically analyzed the backgrounds of 652 startup founders in the tech industry. We looked not just at the narrow slice of tech companies that gets featured most often on TechCrunch, but at the broader universe—those that economists, professors, and the general public would call high-technology companies. And then we studied the backgrounds of a sample of 549 company founders of companies in 12 industries that grow as fast as those in technology, and are equally important to the U.S. economy. Our research focused on “successful” startups—those that had made it out of the garage, had employees, and were actually generating revenue.
We learned that the average age of a successful tech-company founder isn’t 21 as is commonly believed in Silicon Valley, but 39; or, in the broader universe of high-growth companies, 40. Founders of high-growth companies are likely to be married and to have two or more kids. They typically have six to ten years of work experience and real-world ideas. They start companies because they get tired of working for others and want to build wealth before they retire. What stops most people from embarking on the path to entrepreneurship is fear of failure and of the amount of time and effort required.
The question that was posed to me by a number of women’s groups was: what is the difference between men and women founders? This is something that I hadn’t given much thought to, but that I thought was worthy of analysis because it would reveal major differences. I expected that women had very different backgrounds and motivations from those of men.
I shared our data sets with Joanne Cohoon of the National Council of Women in Technology (NCWIT), and she worked with NCWIT analysts to crunch the data. I was really surprised at what we learned: that there was almost no difference between men and women company founders. Both groups had an equally strong desire to build wealth; wanted to capitalize on business ideas; were attracted to the culture of startups; had long-standing desire to own their own company; and were tired of working for others. There were, however, slight differences between the encouragement that women received from co-founders and what men received; and women received slightly more funding than men did from business partners.
Marital status when starting business
Equally importantly, we found no difference in life circumstances between men and women founders. Their average ages when founding their first companies were the same. Likewise, successful men and women entrepreneurs founded their first companies when they had similar numbers of children living at home, though men were more likely than women to be married.
But there is certainly an imbalance between the sexes entering high-tech fields, and that imbalance is increasing over time. The proportion of women studying computer science decreased from 37 percent in 1985 to 19 percent today, according to the National Science Foundation. The imbalance stems from the lack of encouragement that girls receive from their parents to study mathematics and science, and escalates when they join the workforce and receive discouragement. Only one percent of high-tech startups have a woman CEO; there are almost no women in the ranks of chief technology officers.
I recently attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, which had 2150 mostly young women in attendance. This was the largest gathering ever of women in computing in industry, academia, and government. The women discussed topics such as open-source development, computer-language design, and data visualization. And they got a chance to make friends. Many of the women I talked to said this was the first time they had met others like themselves, and they felt really encouraged to continue in computing and to make a difference.
At an executive forum at the conference, I had a chance to discuss, with companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Symantec, the challenges they face in the recruitment, retention, and advancement of women technologists. Their common conclusion was that their company’s success depends on hiring the best talent. They knew, though, that the best talent sometimes was passed over because of unintentional discrimination caused the stereotype that women do not make good techies.
The remedy we discussed was to require that their hiring executives interview at least one woman for every open position. The idea isn’t to hire any candidate less qualified than the best, but to make sure that recruiting efforts include a diverse slate of candidates. In the experience of the company executives, when hiring managers had the chance to meet qualified female candidates, they were more likely to hire women. And to further level the playing field, companies should have at least one woman on the hiring team. People tend to hire those who are similar to them—therefore, the current demographics of the hiring team and company can influence the outcome of hiring.
These are pretty simple remedies. I am not advocating that companies institute any kind of affirmative-action programs or stack the deck against men. But we need to recognize that negative stereotypes such as the ones highlighted in TechCrunch can be harmful and lead to discrimination. Let’s not blame anyone, but let’s act proactively to fix a problem that we all know exists.
Cross-posted from Vivek Wadhwa’s blog on Tech Crunch.
Its not the gender but the vision makes better entrepreneurs …
Pranav
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We at Mobile Cuisine have found that the number of women are right on par with men when it comes to the mobile food truck industry. Unlike the inequality of men:women ration in brick and mortar restaurant kitchens, being the owner of a mobile food truck is an area where women are definitely at the same level as men.
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Hey,
This is a very interesting post as there are very success entrepreneurs both male and female…
I guess and it all comes down to the individual themselves and what passions they have to entrepreneurship.
Thanks,
Billee Brady
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This is really interesting! Particularly in silicon valley, the young white male seems to skip post-college career building and work with a doomed-to-fail startup more than women and minorities. Larger companies such as Yahoo and Cisco, in fact, are increasing the number of female and minority hires because those groups are more likely, it seems, to move in the direction of reliable employment.
The reason many women can’t get further to the startup phase in high tech is that a technical background and line management experience are usually very important to a founding team. However, most of the women in engineering / programming / science get channeled immediately into low-level support and marketing.
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Hello,
I’m a french entrepreneur and I can say that in France many entrepreneurs are men. Not that it’s more difficult for a woman to build her own company, but the French culture is a way far from the one you can find in the United States. French people think that, it’s a man-job to manage employees and it’s too difficult for a woman to do it.
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The reason many women can’t get further to the startup phase in high tech is that a technical background and line management experience are usually very important to a founding team. However, most of the women in engineering / programming / science get channeled immediately into low-level support and marketing. (“Paving the Way for ‘Systers’”, L. Jolitz, San Francisco Chronicle (15 Sept 2003)).
http://articles.sfgate.com/2003-09-15/business/17507168_1_anita-borg-women-s-involvement-computer-science.
Once you’re on this path, you cannot establish a clear record of product creation / development / sales. You can’t obtain the key relationships needed to later fund your own company. You are not likely to get a position as a product manager or in strategy or work your way up the management chain to Director / VP Engineering or CTO.
There are women who are purely MBAs in business and some of them become founding team members. But there are a heck of a lot more men with MBAs too who are just like the women jockeying for those positions. And they’re also competing for the same deal / investment pool.
So unless you have established good relationships in the biz, you are at a significant disadvantage simply because the number of non-technical deals are fewer (e.g. like ad revenue plays based on the same tech everybody uses – unless you come from a big media company, you can’t get the deals).
Finally, any woman in tech faces a constant trivialization of her work precisely because she’s a woman. You’ve got to have a very thick skin, excellent focus and good mentors to maneuver skillfully. This is where groups such as the Anita Borg Institute are very welcome.
But I’d say the biggest factor is simply going to a top-tier university and developing the relationships from the beginning with faculty, roomies, counselors and networking groups. Because when that spinout happens, you won’t hear about it *unless* you’re plugged into the grapevine.
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This is really interesting!! Particularly in silicon valley, the young white male seems to skip post-college career building and work with a doomed-to-fail startup more than women and minorities. Larger companies such as Yahoo and Cisco, in fact, are increasing the number of female and minority hires because those groups are more likely, it seems, to move in the direction of reliable employment.
Alicia
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Key to hiring talent is to pick your HR filters right. Regardless of any correlations between women and tech affinity, you do not want to filter women. You want to filter tech affinity; if there is any correlation between age, gender, education or color socks, it should be reflected in that.
Go for the snake’s head! Don’t be distracted by the stripes.
However, I think one of the reasons why this discussion has not ended is because some people use circular logic. For example, if A->B, and B is what matters, then you can ignore A and measure B; if there is a difference, A will show itself by falling short.
So…what if A does fall short? Does that mean A->B is corrupt, or that A fell short? See, this is where the circular logic comes in. The inability to accept the possibility of A falling short is a dishonest tautology.
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Nice blog post. Just the idea that we have to discus if women are capable of what men are successful at, makes me question, the validity of the view point. Very similar to articles I read about workers from 3rd world countries being able to do equally good job as Americans.
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