
Female Founder Successes of 2009 - jlhamilton
http://www.women2.org/2009-founder-successes/
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spicyj
The creation of this list is evidence that women are not accepted into
entrepreneurial enterprises as well as men are yet. There shouldn't need to be
a list of female founders to single them out.

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sanswork
It is a site for/about women founders. The fact that they made a list of
successful women isn't really evidence of anything. If it was a site about
founders from the east coast we could just as likely see such a list without
assuming people from the east coast are not accepted into entrepreneurial
enterprises.

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chrischen
I think he means the fact that we don't go around making lists of "Male
founder successes," but we do for female founders is indicative of the
imbalance between male and female startup founders, because of the emphasis it
places on females.

Perhaps the list itself isn't indicative of anything, but the site and the
list combined might be. There has to be a reason why it's a site for women,
especially since we don't have sites for startups explicitly for men. That
reason is probably because of our patriarchal society more than anything, but
his implication that perhaps it indicates that the male to female founder
ratio is a little lopsided is not invalid.

I don't think it necessarily means women are not accepted into entrepreneurial
enterprises, because it could also mean that women simply are less interested.

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ivankirigin
What about a list of the successes of people with brown hair?

Also, this could be a case study in how overuse of exclamation points makes
them meaningless.

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rdl
I'd rather see more efforts to bring women into the top of the startup funnel,
vs. singling them out later on if they become successful.

There is some value in having good examples of successful women in
entrepreneurship in convincing more women that they should consider it, but I
think "this person in my graduate department launched a startup" is probably
more significant (regardless of gender) than "a famous woman startup founder
and CEO exits, although I've never met her".

women 2.0 actually does a pretty good job with other programs to try to bring
qualified women into the startup world (partnership with Founder Institute,
various meetups, etc.). I think the most valuable thing would be attracting
more women into college entrepreneurship clubs, entrepreneurial classes in
undergraduate and MBA programs, and in non-startups, encouraging them to take
responsibility to project/product management on products which may become
spinouts or startups.

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maxklein
Since we're splitting into demographics - what's with the low number of
classic ango-saxon women there, and more asian, indians, jewish, etc?

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patio11
Given that the majority of them are coming from technical/web startups, you're
going to see a huge number of technical founders. Five years ago, when I
graduated in CS at a major American research institution, you could throw a
dart at a map of Asia and be guaranteed to hit a country that had contributed
more female engineers to my CS department than there were female white
engineers in the class. Five years later, guess who went on to become
technical founders?

If you want to phrase things in the positive sense, you might phrase it not as
"What does CS do wrong?" but "What does environmental engineering or
biomedical engineering do right?", since they got most of the women in the
engineering school. I have the heretical impulse to say "Offer obvious
opportunities to have a career primarily revolving around interacting with
human beings" but I have learned that "Maybe they just don't _want_ to spent
14 hours a day reading XML files" costs me friends.

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eplanit
Sexism exists so long as people keep tallies -- same with racism. They have
new life breathed into them whenever anyone interposes the racial and gender
lens between themselves and all they observe. Sigh. Here's to another year of
counting (and then of course judging) based on race and gender. Ah, such
progress.

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kingkawn
it seems to be primarily men who think that this kind of thing is meaningless,
fellas.

