
What Stops Female Founders? - ph0rque
http://www.foundersatwork.com/1/post/2011/01/what-stops-female-founders.html
======
bokonist
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.

~~~
brc
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.

~~~
niels_olson
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?!

------
KMStraub
"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.

~~~
Jun8
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...

~~~
KMStraub
No worries, I'm just happy to hear it registered with someone else. There's a
much bigger goal here than Karma points :)

------
tjic
The vast majority of people are not founders.

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".

~~~
jacquesm
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.

------
jacquesm
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.

------
DaniFong
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?

~~~
patio11
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.

------
pamelafox
[I'm a female]

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. :)

~~~
Joakal
I'm curious, why is there a fear of pregnancy?

~~~
YuriNiyazov
Because condoms break and people forget to take pills.

Is this a genuine question?

~~~
Joakal
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?

~~~
YuriNiyazov
No. A Startup is all-enveloping, and a pregnancy is all-enveloping, and
there's only one person

~~~
Joakal
What do you mean by pregnancy as all-enveloping?

~~~
YuriNiyazov
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.

------
webwright
"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.

~~~
ShabbyDoo
[http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/when-it-
com...](http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/when-it-comes-to-
saving-who-would-you-listen-to-my-wife-or-milton-friedman/)

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.

~~~
webwright
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.

------
ebaysucks
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.

------
Joakal
It's pretty much the lack of technical ambition (programmers, engineers, etc).
I reckon 1% of technical people will attempt to try starting something.

This is an issue in gender-dominated industries. I bet there's a similar
article for child care: "What Stops Male Founders?"

~~~
jacquesm
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.

~~~
Joakal
There's a lot of such clues for men too but for me at least, I'm ignoring it
because I believe in what I do.

Are you making it out to be a great conspiracy against women?

~~~
jacquesm
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.

~~~
Joakal
"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.

~~~
jacquesm
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not but on the off chance that you
are not that describes the situation in fairly large chunks of the world.

~~~
Joakal
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).

~~~
jacquesm
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.

some links to underscore these points:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male%E2%80%93female_income_disp...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male%E2%80%93female_income_disparity_in_the_United_States)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_State...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_States)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_United_States>

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.

~~~
xiaoma
>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. some links to underscore
these points:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male%E2%80%93female_income_disp...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male%E2%80%93female_income_disparity_in_the_United_States)

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:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/03/nyregion/03women.html?ex=1...](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/03/nyregion/03women.html?ex=1343793600&en=8941c5442f49a9a4&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss)

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.

------
chollida1
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.

[http://www.ted.com/talks/sheryl_sandberg_why_we_have_too_few...](http://www.ted.com/talks/sheryl_sandberg_why_we_have_too_few_women_leaders.html)

~~~
silverlake
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.

------
Swoopey
[Female Founder]

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:

\--pregnancy hormones \--post-pregnancy hormones \--motherhood

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.

------
shawnee_
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.

~~~
OasisG
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?

------
kakaylor
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.

~~~
WildUtah
_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.

~~~
lizzard
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.

------
stretchwithme
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.

------
jdp23
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.

~~~
fractallyte
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.

~~~
dgabriel
I find the atmosphere at hacker news quite hostile to women, which is why I
skim these days and rarely post.

------
iman
The article title is misleading. After the 4th paragraph, all of the advice is
equally relevant to males and females.

------
pmchiu
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...](http://www.examiner.com/women-s-entrepreneurship-in-washington-
dc/we-re-just-getting-started-women-owned-businesses-to-generate-5-million-
new-jobs-by-2018)) 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.

------
sayemm
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...](http://www.buffettsecrets.com/rose-blumkin-
nebraska-furniture-mart.htm)

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...](http://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/13/business/rose-blumkin-retail-queen-
dies-at-104.html?src=pm)

"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

------
temphn
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"

------
rdl
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.

------
int_main_void
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?

~~~
jdp23
There's plenty of excellent research out there -- "Unlocking the clubhouse" is
a good place to start.

And maybe you're not interested in why we don't have more women, but lots of
other people are.

------
wtracy
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. :-)

------
david927
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.

------
imkevingao
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.

------
Tycho
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.

------
known
Women have different & distinct priorities in life.

------
ahoyhere
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.

------
Charuru
How many male English majors are founding companies?

I would think being an English major is the first problem, you need more women
in CS/Engineering first.

~~~
ShabbyDoo
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.

~~~
Charuru
...

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.

------
mkramlich
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.

