SILICON VALLEY SEXISM: IS
THE ANSWER TO DITCH MEN
ALTOGETHER?
SOME
FED-UP WOMEN ARE CREATING A NEW TECH-STARTUP INFRASTRUCTURE THAT
SUPPORTS FEMALE ENTREPRENEURS--WITH NO MEN ALLOWED.
Three
days after an entrepreneur named TD Lowe arrived in Silicon Valley
from Phenix City, Alabama, she approached a well-known venture
capitalist at a networking event. Lowe had watched the bigwig
politely interact with several men who approached him, but when it
was her turn she had a very different experience. Before she could
even say her name, he looked her up and down and said, “You’ll
never make the connections here you need to be successful; you need
to get a job.” She walked away shaking with anger. Her takeaway:
Silicon Valley is not a friendly place for women. That experience led
Lowe to a Menlo Park accelerator calledWomen’s
Startup Lab,
which helps female entrepreneurs navigate the often-hostile startup
world. Despite that early disheartening encounter, Lowe now owns a
company, EnovationNation,
that connects people with ideas to those who can make them a reality,
and the help and encouragement she got from Women’s
Startup Labis
part of the reason.
Much
has been written about the harassment, condescension, and other
sexist behavior that remains dismayingly common in Silicon Valley.
Some women are trying to change that culture from within. But others
are finding a different solution: ditching men altogether to create
their own female-only startup
support systems.
A female entrepreneur can now launch a company, raise money, fill a
board of advisors, and strike it rich without ever dealing with men.
This female-oriented infrastructure includes incubators like Women
2.0, SheEO,
and Google’s 1871
FEMtech;
venture and angel funds such as Golden
Seeds, Belle
Capital USA,
andTexas
Women Ventures;
and mentoring programs started by big names such as Tory Burch and
Arianna Huffington. “You can’t really change the existing
reality,” says Vicki
Saunders,
a serial entrepreneur and founder of the female accelerator SheEO.
“You need to create a new reality to make the old one obsolete. You
have to demonstrate another way that works.”
Many
of the women who started these groups can name the moment when they
realized how unfriendly Silicon Valley could be toward them.
For Natalia
Oberti Noguera,
founder and CEO of Pipeline
Fellowship (which
has turned more than 80 women into angel investors), it was during an
investor meeting when man after man took turns saying things like,
“My girlfriend and her friends think we should consider such and
such.” As one of only two women in the room, she wondered why more
weren’t there to speak for themselves. Others just grew weary of
the bro culture that pervades so many startups. “There was a
constant conflict about when to play along and when to push back [at
her previous job], and that gets tiring,” saysVanessa
Dawson,
founder of a networking group called Girls
Raising that
helps founders pitch their ideas and secure funding. “I am so sick
of trying to conform to the way things are being done.”
In
the past, women have tried to overcome these challenges with boycotts
(After the Facebook IPO, some women protested its lack of female
board members), lawsuits, and discussions of how women can better fit
into the male world. The idea has always been to change Silicon
Valley culture, or at least teach women how to better cope with it.
But more and more women now believe that fighting the system is
futile, and the only effective way to get women on equal footing is
to create a new game just for them. “I would rather create a space
or an environment or a community where women can be innovative, raise
funds, and operate on their own terms,” says Dawson.
Oberti
Noguera says the only way to get more women involved (and funded) is
to let the females take the lead. “People support people who look
like them and are familiar,” she says. But there are some
differences. For one thing, these groups offer something that men
can’t: empathy. Participants in SheEO, for example, start the
program by sitting in a circle and passing the Kleenex box. Some
women need to “get their own shit out of the way,” says Saunders,
before appearing bold and ambitious in public. Guys, on the other
hand, tend to “just fake it.” They also teach participants how to
eschew the traditional system and play to their strengths. Women are
clearly at a disadvantage with VC funding. Just one in eight
companies that raised venture financing in the first half of 2014 has
a female founder or cofounder, according to Dow Jones VentureSource.
So Saunders tells SheEO founders to forget about VCs. Go
crowdsourcing, where the neighborhood is friendlier. (A study
published by academics at New
York University and University
of Pennsylvania in
July found that 65% of tech projects started by women get funded on
Kickstarter, while only 30% of men’s do.) “There are millions of
people out there,” she says. “It’s such an old model of
scarcity to think there are only 17 VCs who can fund me. We need to
find what works for us and do it.”
The
groups also possess pools of money earmarked for women-led ventures.
SheEO is launching a campaign in the fall to get a million women and
men to contribute $1,000 each to create a $1 billion pool of capital.
And Girls Raising is working to create a $10 million seed fund. Money
is the most important item women can provide each other, says Kelly
Hoey, one of the founders of the accelerator Women In Motion. Women
should be saying, “Thanks for the re-tweet. Now where’s the
check?”
These
women don’t bash men or even necessarily want to be separated from
them. “I want to include men,” said Dawson. “I envision our
community being 50/50. Men are integral to the whole conversation,
and they need to be worked in as well. But when there isn’t
diversity in a system, you have to help out the community that isn’t
being equally represented.”
For
some women, the ultimate goal of this movement is to make it
obsolete. The hope is that things will progress to the point where
they don’t need to exclude men from their ventures. In some cases,
that’s already starting to happen. Astia, a group that funds female
entrepreneurs, now has seven male angels on its investing team,
including Larry Bettino, managing partner at StarVest Partners, and
Adam Quinton, CEO of Lucas Point Ventures. And Saunders is
considering adding men to her accelerator because so many male
founders have inquired about getting involved. Why are they
interested? Often, she says, “it’s fathers showing up because
they have daughters.”
Ideally,
things will change as awareness increases and people learn how
hurtful their actions can be. It will take time, but Saunders, for
one, is optimistic. “We have to start modeling behaviors,” she
says. “A lot of people think [the current hostility toward women]
is the way it has to be, but I think there are so many people out
there who would like to see a different world than the one they
created. We made all this up, and we can change it.”
ALYSON
KRUEGER
http://www.fastcompany.com/3037372/innovation-agents/silicon-valley-sexism-is-the-answer-to-ditch-men-altogether?utm_source
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