Women Entreprenuers?
Wow, I have quite randomly appeared in Exec, an international website geared towards business executives, in an article entitled Women in Enterprise. The article uses me as an example of “steller female talent” from Silicon Valley to discuss the emergence of entrepreneurial women worldwide. I find this honor a bit silly as women like Nina Bianchini (CEO and co-founder of Ning) and 23andMe co-founders Linda Avey and Anne Wojcicki, are really breaking ground and kicking ass in Silicon Valley.
The subject of Women Entrepreneurs always fun to explore.This Exec article suggests that more women are becoming entrepreneurs and challenging traditional boundaries. Over the last couple of decades the percentage of small businesses owned by women has climbed past 25%. But these numbers are deceiving as one look around the tech landscape demonstrates that women aren’t entering every entrepreneurial space in equal numbers. This was especially obvious at the Google I/O event last week as I think women were outnumbered 20-1.Women simply are not around starting companies in certain industries, usually around the math and sciences and related to tech, engineering and finance. The few women that do appear in the space are most frequently in PR or marketing.
One major thesis on this drought is because girls have not historically entered the maths and sciences at the level of boys. The leaders of the tech industries today were the ham radio gurus and computer hackers of yesterday. We need to encourage our young girls to build things, write code, be geeky! As a kid everyone always referred to me as a ‘tomboy’, I just thought sports, and woodwork, and playing war with elaborate forts to construct were the cool things to do. Its neat to be called ’steller talent’ even on a random international site, but the Exec article is a bit ahead of its time. Women aren’t quite sprinting to call themselves entrepreneurs quite yet.
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