When 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 something like: "Well, I would have kids and stay at home and take care of them. As they grew up, I would love to work more with the catholic church, because that means a lot to me." And in fact, my mom ended up not needing to work, and doing exactly that. But she did not need to make the sacrifices Jessica lists above, nor did spend four years schlepping away at a startup. Instead she just got married to solid, hard working fellow who was happy to be the primary breadwinner.
So perhaps one reason women don't do startups as much, is because they do not need to. It's still far more socially normal for the guy to be the primary breadwinner, and many guys are very willing to work and have their wife stay at home. Since women have a greater ability to leave the workforce or opt out of lousy job (since their family is less dependent on their pay check), women have less of a need to pin their hopes on a risky startup in order to escape the rat race.
Excellent point. I'm surprised that I've never heard this rational before. Compared to the other theories, this is definitely the Occam's Razor version. For many women there is a good chance that their future husband will be the "breadwinner"... What's the point of compressing 40 years of work into 4, if you aren't planning on working 40 to begin with?
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 mainstream family model, even if the mother is working, it's usually for financial rather than career-aspiration reasons.
I do hope this post leads someone out there to make the big jump. A world with a female version of Zuckerberg out there would be a very interesting one indeed.
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?!
Yes, the sacrifices are the lead points in that article.
Folks who actually found/join startups are ignorant of/don't care about the sacrifices. Save enough to be comfortable? What's wrong with crashing on a couch, living in the office/a friend's basement, eating ramen?
I think the article is very telling. Women (that woman at any rate) won't consider a job that is uncomfortable.
Yes, there may be reasons for THAT, but the comfort issue is at the heart.
And, for some of us, the asymmetric return is not really the biggest part of the value proposition. Its the control, the innovation, the environment that appeals. We use many excuses but stim-junkies and thrill-seekers are what they are.
"I wanted to do x, but no one would hire me even though I was capable because I didn’t have sufficient experience in x on my resume."
I definitely identify with this line. I'm a 27-year-old woman and I left a cushy (read: boring) job writing for Vogue magazine so I could create a dating site that women will actually feel proud to join. Like so many, I was under the assumption you had to have ninja coding skills, an MBA, Google on your resume, or a genius gene to become a founder. I had none of those, and having worked as a print journalist, I missed the boat on the importance of developing your online brand. I had nothing to give me credibility--not even a Twitter page. And let's face it, my one laurel, ie that shiny "Vogue" on my resume, meant nothing to this audience.
I tried to get a job at a startup just to see what I was getting myself into, and no one would hire me. I had pretty much one friend in the biz--Meetup's cofounder Matt Meeker--and once he heard my idea, he said, "You've got to do this." I said, "But I don't have experience or any sort of reputation," and he said, "The best and most efficient way to get those things is to just do it."
So, I'm doing it. I probably wouldn't have if Matt hadn't offered those words of wisdom and created such an unthreatening environment in which to pitch him. The other thing that helped me plow forward when I wanted to give in to all the judgmental haters out there was the research I did on what sort of skills investors look for in the entrepreneurs they fund. If more women knew that it's about PERSPIRATION and PERSEVERANCE above all, I truly believe we'd have more female founders.
I've always had that fire in the belly that makes for a good entrepreneur. If it weren't for the misconceptions that you have to be some sort of savant to start something, I would have, like Jessica, maybe done this at 25. Though I've got a lot of catching up to do, I'm so thankful I realized I CAN do this, I SHOULD do this (to gain experience if nothing else), and I WANT to do this--because if I pull this off, I'll have accomplished something 100x more gratifying than anything I could have ever done working in corporate.
YIKES, I loved your post and wanted to upvote, but with the tiny buttons on my Droid I downvoted instead. So, if you want to know what kind of jerk would downvote such an inspiring remark, well...
So, instead of asking "what stops 99.99% of women from founding [ ... and 99.98% of men ]", I think it might be more productive to ask "what causes 0.015 of people to become founders".
Curiosity, a lack of knowing the risks and a drive to know what's inside the box and how to make a better box, a road to a different kind of life, for themselves and/or those around them.
Those seem to be the common factors between all entrepreneurs that I know, no doubt there are others.
Not only would that be more productive, I think it would make for a much more interesting study. What are the common traits found in the 0.015% of women who choose to create startups, and how can we encourage these traits in other women who have an interest in entrepreneurial ventures of any kind?
Answering your question seemed to be a big reason for writing Founders at Work to begin with. I agree with your point, but the parent article seems to be expanding into this case, rather than changing direction.
The women founders that I know would answer very simply: 'absolutely nothing'.
To top it off they're collectively much further ahead than the men, even if there are far fewer of them.
Most women that I know balk at one simple item: loss of security. They like their paycheck and the lack of worries that come with it and they see running a company as going to war. And it's been traditionally the men that go to war.
But when women do decide to go to war they do so with gusto and the female founders that make a go of it typically take no prisoners, they're good at what they do and they'd give any guy or girl a run for their money.
What works for one will not work for all, that's the same in the male as well as in the female world.
JL is not just talking to her past self, she's talking to all the potential female founders out there and her words ring true, only, would she have taken her own advice at the age of 25? That's a thing we'll never know, but lets hope that YC will see a higher number of quality female applicants to prove that these words did not fall on deaf ears.
Interesting anecdote: so far 100% of the female engineers we've tried to hire who've turned us down (four so far...) did so in order to try to start their own startup, for at least a while. Of those two (that's 50%) raised outside capital so far, each just a few months after our offer.
I wonder if this is a fluke, or a result of the massive influx of women into greentech?
I would not have been surprised by this, at all, given the relative ratios in Environmental Engineering (don't quote me on this, but I perceived it as about 60:40 in favor of women) as compared to Computer Science at my alma mater (that was, ahem, not 60:40 -- closer to 4:96).
Edit for context: major American research university, 2000 - 2004. The bulk of people I knew at university would be late twenties or early thirties now.
I'm currently at a point where I feel like I've saved a fair amount of money and could support myself for a while without a steady source of income (with a a relatively inexpensive lifestyle- no car, no house, no family), but I do sometimes worry that I will accidentally get pregnant (shit happens) and what appeared like a substantial amount of savings for one person won't be enough for two.
Anyway, so there's that. But I think I'll swallow that particular paranoia and go for it someday soon anyway. :)
Yes, as a wannabe male founder, worries about pregnancy are pretty low on my priorities list even though I would have to make cutbacks to support her. But I didn't think even pregnancy worries should prevent her from enjoying her life, or being a founder as she mentioned that the paranoia is stopping her.
Heck, wouldn't it be a great inspiration for a female founder's project getting major traction while pregnant?
Same thing I mean by startup being all-enveloping. A startup fully takes over the founder's life. A pregnancy fully takes over the expecting mother's life.
Most people I know would say that's easily solvable by abortion. What I'm thinking she means is that she might suddenly decide that having a kid is a good idea. In which case the question is justified.
"Duh. Of course no one should live beyond their means. But I’d never thought about the implications of that when I was 25."
I read a while ago that 40% of American households spend more than they make in post-tax income. I imagine this has gone down a bit, but it's still astounding. People are really good at convincing themselves that their "ship will come in" and they'll be able to wipe that debt clean.
Consider a Standford CS undergrad working part-time in an on-campus computer lab who will graduate in a few months. Given that he/she has decided to take a market-rate job somewhere upon graduation, what is the probability that his income will be substantially higher a few months from now? How concerned should he be that his ship will not come in? Would it be rational for him to spend some money he doesn't have on bar tabs, weekend trips, and other such frivolity before working 60+ hours/week for Google/Facebook/Whatever? Conversely, it would be much riskier if this undergrad, after taking a job at Facebook, took upon debt with the assumption of a pay-off upon an IPO.
They'd probably be fine. But debt (or lack of savings), as Jessica points out, limits options.
Failure to save also results in a lifestyle inflation. Cable bills, expensive hobbies, etc. It's hard to step out of that tarpit once you're in it.
Your CS undergrad would be LESS fine if, at the last minute, they realized they wanted to start their own company.
My understanding is that (until very recently) household debt tended to go up every year. That seems to indicate that most people are pretty bad about judging when and if their ship will come in.
My experience from being part of the undergrad recruiting team at a strategy consultant with a "women initiative": Men go hunting, women go picking berries.
Many women don't want to make the time investment strategy/banking/startups require as taking a job as accountant, HR manager or university researcher leaves more time to invest in finding a suitable mate and get children.
IMO in Western culture we go overboard in trying to equalize everything. Many woman seek men earning more than them, and men like being the provider.
Ambition is not the whole story. Women that do have ambition (technical or not) are dissuaded by a whole series of subtle and not so subtle social cues that that is not their place to be. Even when they're just as good as everybody else.
"No, no conspiracy, just conventions that we would probably do better without but which are deeply ingrained in society. .. So deep that we're no longer even aware of them."
This is so silly. If that was true, gays would be executed/exiled, interracial marriages remain banned, slaves would continue to serve the masters, etc.
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 today in the USA, the only thing you've probably dealt with successfully is slavery.
The rest of the world is more or less lucky with all of those depending on the location and the crib that you were born in to.
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.
Really, we're far from there, on paper everybody is equal but in real life that's absolutely not true, not even close, and gender equality in founders is just a reflection of gender equality issues earlier in life, in the educational system and in society in general.
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:
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.
I was challenging your absolutist statement that humanity can't deal with social prejudices by being unaware: "No, no conspiracy, just conventions that we would probably do better without but which are deeply ingrained in society. .. So deep that we're no longer even aware of them." So I presented the country's people of the author who has dealt with the issues tremendously well compared to 'large chunks' of the world.
Sheryl Sandberg gave a good talk on a very similar topic at Ted. Her conclusion was that women tended to "check out" of work sooner then men.
One example she gave was that when women start trying to get pregnant, they will often stop applying for promotions because they know they'll be leaving work soon.
This is also the reason that the BLS statistics that claim men make more than women for comparable work is misleading. Women take a leave for a few years, downshift their careers, or purposely pick easier career paths so they can spend more time with children and family. For women who choose to continue their career at top-speed, they have a huge advantage. Since companies are looking to promote more women, they choose from the smaller pool of women who want to climb the corporate ladder.
Perhaps the title should read, "What Stops Women from Becoming Founders? I was hoping to read an essay on women who are already founders and their challenges (as the title implies).
I am a founder and will be launching my start-up soon, and I have a newborn. I am truly thankful that I can stay home, take care of my baby and continue working on executing my idea.
I agree with Jessica's points and appreciate her sharing her personal experience, however, there aren't specific to women.
IMO, what can really stop a female founder from pushing their idea through to execution is:
Seriously, when facing these three factors, you must be absolutely certain about your idea and driven to keep it moving; especially when it's easier to hold your sweet baby all day and simply throw in the towel.
It's probably a combination of factors that make "the female founder" seem more rare than she actually is.
There is a breed of female founder that lives to pose for cameras and magazine covers and to be mentioned in Valleywag. But more common are those who are happy to grow their companies to a certain point that is manageable enough. They don't want or get a lot of attention, which makes them seem more rare than they actually are.
Maybe the core issue is that females don't tend to form the kind of companies that tend to get really big really fast. Each iteration of a growing company changes the social / cultural dynamic of a company, too; these are areas which females tend to treat with more care.
There is a breed of female founder that lives to pose for cameras and magazine covers and to be mentioned in Valleywag.
~~~~~
Your comment seems to suggest there's some special rule that women cannot/should not seek to be recognized in the press for their work. Judging by the frequent coverage of foursquare, facebook, twitter, google, etc male founders don't seem to have any issue self-promoting. Does your rule apply to men too?
So you're suggesting that women might be less likely to found companies that have big exits, and be more likely to try to found lifestyle businesses? Interesting.
I'm curious, do you have any numbers to back up this claim?
I wonder if this is more a symptom of having few women in the field of computer science / software engineering [1] than a lack of women who want to be founders [2]. It isn't too surprising when you consider only a small percentage of people in computer science decide to become founders, and then a small percentage of that pool ends up being women.
[1] I am assuming that most people in startups are computer science types. Which isn't entirely (or very) accurate. Certainly when you add in fields like design and business/marketing this really changes.
[2] Of course, being a founder doesn't require restricting oneself to starting a technical business.
I wonder if this is more a symptom of having few women in the field of computer science / software engineering
Women -- girls -- with talent and potential mostly leave the STEM track when they're twelve to fifteen years old. Looking for the cause of different quantities of company founders in factors that affect thirty-year-olds isn't going to address the biggest difference.
Looking at 14 year olds isn't going to help the 30 year olds who did stick with STEM and are here right now. It's great to help girls, but I have to wonder that that is so often the answer when grown women point out there are problems.
Why do many men often have more power than women do in general?
I suspect those are the same reasons that women are less inclined to start a business.
Men are more inclined to leave where they grew up, venture out, confront the unknown, focus on just one thing relentlessly and disagree with the group.
That doesn't mean women don't or can't, just that they are less likely to, for whatever reasons.
One 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.
If 4% of founders in YC are female I would be interested to know what the breakdown of male/female entrepreneurs are for businesses outside of tech. My initial guess is that there are a lot more female entrepreneurs outside of the valley than there are in the valley. This article (http://www.examiner.com/women-s-entrepreneurship-in-washingt...) would seem to (albeit not definitely) agree with that assumption. So if we think there is a significant difference I would be really interested to see a profile of a female tech entrepreneur and a female non-tech entrepreneur. That profile would reveal a lot about why more women don't create technology startups.
In the end I think women are quite entrepreneurial and can make the sacrifices, tradeoffs, and decisions necessary to succeed. I just don't think the type of businesses that most women are interested in creating are technology in nature.
Great piece by Jessica. It's cool reading this as I'm 25 years old now, even though I'm a guy. Whenever the topic of women entrepreneurs comes to mind though, I always think of Rose Blumkin - http://www.buffettsecrets.com/rose-blumkin-nebraska-furnitur...
She was Buffett's most favorite founder at Berkshire Hathaway. Granted that she's quite the outlier (started her first business when she was 44 and then worked 7 days/week until the age of 104!), she's a clear-cut example of someone who defies the stereotype. She's one of the most hardcore founders I have ever read about. Another great piece on her life: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/13/business/rose-blumkin-reta...
"Put her up against the top graduates of the top business schools or chief executives of the Fortune 500 and, assuming an even start with the same resources, she'd run rings around them" - Buffett
Men 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"
A 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.
First 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 bright economics teacher in collage who had many terribly enlightening stories [read most boring but some nuggets of pure gold]. Among them, he said once that some people just arn't cut out for owning a business. Anyone can operate a business, just not many people can deal with the amount of risk associated with owning a business. This teacher likened it to being able to sleep at night knowing there was a chance however small that your company would burn down that night. Some people just can't do it.
Anyway, this article pretty much gave a very long list of reasons why to AVOID starting a company. Mainly, because its hard, there is a great deal of risk, oh yeah and its really hard.
Why do women seldom start companies? Why are there seldom women firefighters? I don't know, because its a damn dirty job and they just don't want to do it. Nothing wrong with that, plenty of men don't want to be firefighters and for that matter entrepreneurs. Its stressful, its hard, and just as often as you hear about facebook hitting it big you can count off dozens of companies that fail every year.
The question isn't why don't we have more women, the question is why do we have so many men?
My own two cents on the "finding a technical co-founder" section: Be aware of the differences between actual software development and normal IT work.
While there are quite a few IT people who are very good at programming and even do it as part of their job, the skills required for maintaining a server farm and developing an application are very different.
Of course, anyone with strong skills in both IT and development is likely to be a hero in a small startup. :-)
I'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.
I believe it's simply societal influences. Growing up, young girls follow the influence of older women. Mostly the pop culture nowadays. You have a small portion of female overachievers, but out of the small portion, even a smaller amount would pursue entrepreneurship.
I believe women are just as capable as men in all abilities, but ever since the nascence of civilization, women just had a different role. As society progress, the roles have shifted a bit, but the overall theme is still relatively similar as thousands of years ago. Nothing stops female founders except for themselves.
differences in future-time orientation between men and women
I am skeptical as to whether future-time orientation is the issue. Even if we assume it is a personality issue (rather than simply the tech gender ratio), it is more likely that the likelihood of success estimation is at the root.
Future time orientation generally refers to your ability to say "Suffer now for 100% guaranteed success in 5 years" - for example, save now for retirement.
Founding is not like that. Founding is "Suffer now for X% guaranteed success in 5 years". The question is what you tell yourself X is. If Group A think it is 50%, they are more likely to found that Group B, who think it is 1% and are who will probably give it a miss.
But I doubt any of it is relevant. It's worth remembering that something like 40% of small businesses in the US are owned or co-owned by women. It's going to be hard to find an intrinsic reason that applies to the tech industry that does not apply to other types of business.
Im told that startups are very risky, low chnce of success. I'm also told that females are more risk averse than men. I'm not sure if that's true but what you could do is: look at other high risk fields, and see if women make more or less than 4% of the demographic.
Of course I suppose startups aren't risky in the sense of life threatening.
There 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.
The discussion of founding a company has been artificially limited to web start-ups. What if Jessica had started a "PR firm for the rest of us" which made professional PR more accessible to small companies? There might be a technology component, but I would argue that her experience in corporate communications would be closer to the start-up's core competencies.
Tech companies is not an artificial limitation... just happens to be what we're talking about right now. The numbers cited are about SV startups, I think if you look outside SV there's way more than 5% female founders.
i read this despite expecting it to be yet another whine about how women are oppressed (rather than, gosh, just different) and was pleasantly surprised to find it was a pretty good and helpful piece on startup and career advice.
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 something like: "Well, I would have kids and stay at home and take care of them. As they grew up, I would love to work more with the catholic church, because that means a lot to me." And in fact, my mom ended up not needing to work, and doing exactly that. But she did not need to make the sacrifices Jessica lists above, nor did spend four years schlepping away at a startup. Instead she just got married to solid, hard working fellow who was happy to be the primary breadwinner.
So perhaps one reason women don't do startups as much, is because they do not need to. It's still far more socially normal for the guy to be the primary breadwinner, and many guys are very willing to work and have their wife stay at home. Since women have a greater ability to leave the workforce or opt out of lousy job (since their family is less dependent on their pay check), women have less of a need to pin their hopes on a risky startup in order to escape the rat race.