Women and Startups

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.