By Linda Forrest
Since my blog post last week, I’ve seen a lot of coverage regarding the issue of women in technology.
A Rabble.ca article shared the following:
During a town Hall meeting this April attended by President Obama, it was announced that women make up only 25 per cent of the technology workforce, and only 18 per cent of those taking computer science courses.
The numbers are even smaller when it comes to startups. Women head up only 10 per cent of startups in the U.S., despite the fact that 40 per cent of all businesses are 50 per cent or more owned by women.
The good news is that there are a number of accelerators working to boost those numbers.
TechVibes reported on two emerging accelerators here in Canada that are actively seeking applications from female-run startups.
Despite what we’ve all been reading, I think it’s a great time to be a female entrepreneur in Canada.
We’ve got two brand spanking new startup accelerators –FounderFuel in Montreal and GrowLab in Vancouver – and they’re both very eager to have female representation in their inaugural group of portfolio companies.
GrowLab was co-founded by Debbie Landa, who commented on the percentage of applications from women:
“We’ve had a good number of applicants so far but would love to see more women entrepreneurs apply for GrowLab, I know they are out there,” said Landa. “I look forward to the day that over 50% of our applicants will come from women instead of only 5%”.
Given the fact that women represent at least half of the population, this is not an unreasonable expectation. Except for the fact that we live in a continent where, in an effort to emulate the style of the Apple Store, an Ohio courthouse was designed and built with a clear glass staircase. Very practical for the female population who wear dresses and skirts.
Because that’s the world we live and do business in, there are some inherent challenges for women looking to succeed in tech.
FounderFuel got into some hot water itself when their panel of 85 mentors included zero women. They quickly owned up to their “ignorance” that resulted in such an oversight and publicized their effort to attract female entrepreneurs and female mentors. Irony reigns, however, thanks to the insights of Tara Hunt, who we’ve previously interviewed on this site:
Hunt is a Montreal-based startup entrepreneur and author, and one of the most influential women in technology, according to Fast Company Magazine. She’s so active in the startup community that she’s actually mentored some of the 85 men at FounderFuel. Hunt is also the CEO & Co-Founder of a startup, Buyosphere. But she wasn’t initially invited to the FounderFuel club.
“Looking at the list makes me giggle. Many of those listed came to me for mentorship at one time,” she posted on Twitter.
This fiasco wasn’t the only recent black eye for Montreal’s tech community insofar as equal rights and representation goes. The International Startup Festival, to be hosted in July, came under fire with its so-called Granny’s Den initiative that implied that its panel of grandmothers were likely to be the least tech savvy of any potential group and thus fit to “award one lucky startup the prize for the presentation best understood by a grandmother.” My iPad wielding mother (my son’s grandmother), with whom I Skype regularly and who taught intricate computerized sewing machine programs to many women her age and older over the past twenty years in her own business, would be insulted at the implied sexism in this contest, and rightly so.
From the aforementioned Rabble.ca article:
Jessica Livingston, a founding partner at Y Combinator the seed-stage venture firm, backs this up:
“It’s been true in the past and probably is still true to some extent that investors discriminate against women. Not necessarily consciously, but their models of the ideal founder are current successful founders, who are mostly men.”
And sometimes it is conscious. Even Livingston’s Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham has stated the following on his own blog (as reported by Zuhairah Scott Washington of Forbes):
“One advantage startups have over established companies is that there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. For example, I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon. But you’re not allowed to ask prospective employees if they plan to have kids soon…Whereas when you’re starting a company, you can discriminate on any basis you want about who you start it with.”
Hunt concurs:
Tara Hunt, whose recent blog post on subtle discrimination in tech industry was featured in the Wall Street Journal:
I’ve had the same conversation with every kickass woman CEO, founder, executive and entrepreneur I know. It goes like, “They don’t say it, but I *know* they treat me differently. They aren’t taking me seriously because I don’t act like a man and when I act like a man, they call me difficult.”
According to a Globe and Mail article from earlier this year, women in Canada have less success and are able to borrow fewer dollars from traditional lenders than their male counterparts.
It’s not all doom and gloom, however. There are a number of accelerators focused on bringing startups founded by women to the next level, assisting them with securing funding and, well, accelerating their success. Some examples, in addition to those already listed, are:
Astria, an international organization whose Silicon Valley Program sees successful applicants attend an intensive six-day workshop and then receive two months of personalized coaching from the Astria network of angels, VC, corporations and entrepreneurs. It runs similar programs annually in New York and London. The program has a proven track record:
A Successful Woman highlights the following as female-focused or women-friendly tech accelerators:
The aforementioned Y Combinator, not only has insight into the female statistics, in part thanks to its female cofounder, but an appetite for building its applications from female run companies, as evidenced by Livingston’s active outreach to the female entrepreneur and technology communities.
Women 2.0 is “a 5-week pre-incubator program, aimed to aid female entrepreneurs with entrepreneurial issues and increase feminine participation in business operations such as incubators and accelerators.”
In the same article, A Successful Woman provides this encouraging statistic:
In the past 14 years, female-founded businesses have grown at twice the rate of male-founded businesses, suggesting that, in time, women will surely become more well represented in incubators and accelerators.
Image: Communicaid
