Women have different & distinct priorities in life.
What Stops Female Founders?
61–70 of 78 posts
Re: What Stops Female Founders?
#62First of all let me start by saying that I dislike articles such as this for many reasons but mainly because research is few and far between and most arguments turn into a 81 cents argument (i e there is obviously discrimination a foot). [by the way 81 cents on the dollar is the amount women earn annually compared to men, not sure if that needed explanation] Anyway, here's my opinion on the subject. I had a very brig…
There's plenty of excellent research out there -- "Unlocking the clubhouse" is a good place to start.
And maybe you're not interested in why we don't have more women, but lots of other people are.
Re: What Stops Female Founders?
#63One of the things YC could do to help with their horrible 4% ratio is get Hacker News to be less hostile to women. Quite a few women founders have told me how unpleasant they find it here. This thread is a good example of why.
Re: What Stops Female Founders?
#64A disproportionately low percentage of female founders in IT/tech startups might be due to a lower number of female CS/engineering graduates and workers.
However, in biology and medicine, I believe women are now the majority of new graduates. Yet, the majority of biotech and pharma startup founders are men (and I believe the stats are that an even higher percentage of biotech startups have male founders than cs/internet startups!). Biotech startups are more capital intensive, and have an entirely different funding and exit profile, but I think this is a useful data point. Qualified women are still not starting startups at the rate one would predict; maybe they are rational in choosing not to, maybe there are artificial barriers which can be removed (even something as simple as lack of awareness that of founding startups as a possibility), but it's definitely an issue.
Re: What Stops Female Founders?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are we discussing USA if not the western world? This was assumed from the author's article of why women are given as much chance as men to be a founder yet prefer not to (She's promoting a female founder meetup in NYC).
Women are facing pretty much the same issues in greater or lesser form the world over, you added in all the other items that have no bearing on the subject as proof that those things are 'no longer issues', but while they're no longer an issue for a large number of people the fact is that there is lots of social pressure against interracial marriages even today in the USA, there is tons of discrimination against gays…
>So, even if we limit our view to the US then it's not all roses, and the female-male wage gap is still very much present.
some links to underscore these points:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male%E2%80%93female_income_disp...
The wage gap you speak of has a long history of misrepresentation for political reasons. Yes, it's true that the average female full-time workers earn about 1/4 less than men, but as the wikipedia page you linked to points out, "The statistic does not take into account differences in experience, skill, occupation, education or hours worked as long as it qualifies as Full-time work."
Furthermore in more and more urban areas young, single women earn more than young single men. The original post was talking about being a 25 year-old woman in NYC, a where women in their 20's earn 117% of what men in their cohort do. This same trend is true in Chicago, Boston, Minneapolis, Dallas and other large cities:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/03/nyregion/03women.html?ex=1...
It's the standard PC line that differences in male/female outcomes are due to discrimination in cases where women are coming out behind (e.g. hard sciences, engineering, entrepreneurship), and the outcomes are not to be worried about when it's the opposite (e.g. homelessness, workplace death, life expectancy, child custody). It saddens me to see that kind of knee-jerk political reaction here, though.
Re: What Stops Female Founders?
#66When the author writes out all the sacrifices needed, it makes it look incredibly hard. And, in fact, starting a startup is in general a very long slog. What makes it worth while is the prospect of asymmetric returns (either in money or in future freedom). If you had asked my mom at age 30 (before she had me), "What would you do if you had enough money that you didn't have to work?". She would have probably said some…
Good job of posting the bleeding obvious but politically incorrect truth. All of the women I know who are full-time mothers do so out of personal choice. Most left careers of some type or another to do so. Obviously there are exceptions to this rule, but there remains a large amount of families out there where the man is happy to bring in the money and the woman is happy to look after the kids. It's still the mainstr…
My favorite was the gorgeous 29 year-old chief resident in pediatrics who said it's strictly a back-up plan: she's marrying a neurosurgeon and has no plans to work after residency. Um . . . Do you think the admissions committees would have committed the social resources of a coveted medical school seat (only 45% of applicants ever get in, and the total cost of the education is around $400,000 per seat) or residency (her training involves other people dying) if she put that in her personal statement?!
Re: What Stops Female Founders?
#67Men and women have different chromosomes, organs, lifespans, brain chemistry[1], expressed genes[2], and the list goes on.
In particular, they also had/have substantially different risk/reward payoff functions. A man who risks all could potentially have thousands[3] of descendants if his bet pays off. A woman will have, at most, a few dozen children.
There are good mathematical models [4] of evolution (as well as data from mammals closely related to humans) that show that a high risk/high reward strategy is going to be differentially selected in males, where there isn't a lifetime reproduction cap.
The genome is upon us. We will soon need to stop ignoring biology.
[1] http://brizlab.ucsf.edu/brizlab/home.html
[2] http://adaptivecomplexity.blogspot.com/2006/07/gene-expression-differences-in-males.html
[3] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article444767.ece
[4] Google Scholar starting with "Male Reproductive Skew"Re: What Stops Female Founders?
#68I'm part of a startup where the lead founder is female. When she had the idea, she formed the team, applied for accelerators (including YC) and looked for funding. No one took her seriously. So she pulled it off anyway -- it soft launches next month -- but I can understand how others might get discouraged. Until there are more home runs by female founders, it will be an uphill battle for them.
Re: What Stops Female Founders?
#69One of the things YC could do to help with their horrible 4% ratio is get Hacker News to be less hostile to women. Quite a few women founders have told me how unpleasant they find it here. This thread is a good example of why.
It's funny, I see comments like yours in most related threads, and I don't agree.
There's enough of a sensible audience here to downvote hostile replies, and - far more importantly - to upvote the supportive ones. Guess which type of reply is likely to receive more respect and attention, particularly among female readers?
So I would venture to say that the '4% ratio' is due to something else, and we'd be far better off not hiding behind false/stereotyped/politically-correct make-believe.
Re: What Stops Female Founders?
#70There are lots and lots and LOTS of female entrepreneurs who start all kinds of business. I know - I searched aggressively for women entrepreneurs to see if I could find any who met my criteria, so I could invite them to speak at my conference.
Many women innovate in fields they're interested in, including physical goods manufacture. Many women start social-oriented web sites (not nec. products). Incredible amounts of women are freelancers, consultants, coaches, trainers, writers, etc.
There are hundreds of thousands of western, middle-class women who work as much if not more than the mythical "startup founder" -- on other business endeavors.
This pretty much invalidates the "women don't want to start companies" and "women don't want to work much" theories.
The question is, why don't they do product businesses?
I have a "tech startup." This time a year ago, it was bringing in $3k a month. Now it's $15k. By the end of the next 12 mos, it'll be earning nearly half a million dollars a year. I'm not living off ramen and working 90 hour weeks - to the contrary, I spend maybe 20% time on the app and my husband & I have apartments in Vienna, Austria and Philadelphia, NYC, and a really nice car ;)
That's why I'm trying to bring the products gospel to people (including women) who would otherwise stay employed or start consulting businesses.
I think that women, on average, are more interested in different fields than men. But products cut across all fields.
PS - And before you ask - no, my husband is not a breadwinner. He and I both quit consulting to work on our apps & products. The money ideas are almost always mine.)
I do complain about working too much on Twitter, but that's because I've had a low-grade chronic illness for the past 1.5 yrs and it's got me down. I probably work about 30-40 hours a week average. Sometimes it's 50, and sometimes it's 10.