Amidst a funeral and two coast to coast red-eyes, I attended Y Combinator's startup school last weekend. Stanford's Kresge Auditorium was packed to the brim. Every seat was filled and the back was full of people sitting on the floor with laptops. I was originally supposed to attend the previous evening's event as well but we had to fly to New York on the red eye on Thursday and flew back Friday evening and didn't make it into San Francisco until 9pm, so when I showed up at Kresge, I didn't know a soul.

Having worked as a programmer on Wall Street, I imagined the male/ female ratio would be skewed. I attended Carnegie Mellon. I worked at an Investment Bank and I am a programmer. Being a minority as a woman isn't new to me. I had, however, assumed the percentage of women in the room would be something around 10-12%. I was way off.

It was relatively hard to count because the room was so packed and because some male hackers have long hair, making them indistinguishable from women when you can only see them from the back. My best count was eight. Excluding the speakers and organizers, I counted eight women in a room of over 400 men. That's around 2%. I've never been a huge women's rights activist or even a feminist to be honest, but this depressed me. For the last few weeks, I've been asking many of my entrepreneurial friends if they knew of technical companies started by women (where the women were the technical individuals as well as the founder and when I mean technical, I mean more than HTML or CSS). Some were able to name maybe one or two and many couldn't even think of a single one.

There are many cases where established companies are led by women. When I was at Goldman Sachs, our CIO was a woman. I know some fantastic women coders. There are also cases of companies started by women. Women who are in advertising, marketing, design, fashion and tons of other non-technical fields. But there seem to be very few cases of technical women entrepreneurs.

Women and men are different. They live differently. They work differently. They manage differently. They lead companies differently. This is not to imply that all men are the same but just to point out that there are fundamental differences in the genders that makes their styles of starting and running companies varied. One of the greatest things about America is that we have a lot of choices here. Anyone can start their own company. Anyone can do anything they truly want. This means that if I want to be an employee, I have a large number of companies to choose from. I think having more technical female entrepreneurs would give me, and others like me, more options. I feel that not having those options is depressing and unfortunate.

I don't know what stops technical women from wanting to start their own thing. Maybe it's the kids (I have a lot to say on this and I'll save it for my next post) or the fear of instability. Or maybe it's the lack of balls. When Chris Sacca from Google gave his speech, he said he'd take two questions but one had to be from a woman. The woman he picked asked for suggestions on helping women make more effective/ forceful pitches. Hearing the question made me even more upset. There is no inherent reason for a woman to be more unsure of herself than a man. When I believe an idea, I am so forceful and passionate that it's scary. That's how I talked my way into my graduate degree and that's how I was able to accomplish most of the biggest achievements in my life. I just felt like if this is the best question this girl can come up with, it says a lot about why women don't do startups.