There’s probably nothing more cliché than a female member of the Startup Victoria board writing a blog about women in tech. In fact, when I was asked to investigate putting together some sort of women’s committee for Startup Vic, I’m rather ashamed to say I groaned at the thought. I didn’t like the idea of segregation and special treatment that I feel seems to be implicit in the creation of female-only events. I thought to myself…”I’m fairly comfortable in a male dominated environment, I can ignore it and get on with things. It doesn’t matter to me so why should it matter at all”. Well, was I about to learn a lesson or two!
There is an interesting thing that happens when you begin to investigate who you really are without knowing that’s what you’re doing.
Over the last few weeks, I have met with a variety of women leaders and founders across the tech space (many of whom run female focused tech meetups and hackathons). In learning their stories and hearing their ideas, something began to brew. I started to see patterns and similarities in my own behaviour and preferences that I hadn’t considered previously. For instance, after 2 years running my own business and being involved in the tech startup world and prior to that working in corporate digital space, I’d had plenty of practice being the only woman in a room full of men. But after 10 years of exercising at the gym, I still can’t bring myself to go and work out where all the gym junkie dudes are pumping weights and looking lovingly at themselves in the mirror. I hang out in the nice, safe, group class environment with all the girls. I don’t feel confident out there were I can see men are so much physically stronger than I could ever hope to be. And interestingly, this was a reason that came up time and time again as to why women felt uncomfortable amongst men in the tech ecosystem: confidence.
We still need to do work locally to confirm female participation numbers, but generally speaking most non-female focused tech meet up events will have somewhere between 5%-10% female attendance. Local accelerators struggle as a result. The Melbourne MAP program has no female participants this year and Angelcube has just 1.
There are some outliers locally with The Hub Melbourne co-working space at 50% female participation and internationally, 25% of Y Combinator founders this year were female. So it can’t be that women just aren’t interested…there’s obviously something else going on.
That’s when I started to get really excited, because I realised if Startup Victoria’s mission is “more founders, better founders” then addressing the gender balance issue could be a big part of the answer. Why?
1. More Founders: If the potential female participation rate is 50%, then we could in theory add hundreds of founders to the ecosystem and attract big dollars as well by marketing Victoria as a hub of gender balanced tech innovation.
2. Better Founders: Women and Men have very different and complimentary biology and psychology. This is why, despite the fact that currently 95% of VC backed companies are male owned, women-operated VC backed companies have 12% higher revenues AND more importantly, companies with more equalised gender distribution in the upper echelons garner 30% better results from IPOs (source).
So put the “girl power” stuff aside because this is a super compelling BUSINESS reason that both men and women should want this change to happen. And what’s great is, the tech industry is currently behind many other industries in this regard, so there is huge amount of low hanging fruit: things we can do simply and easily that could have an immediate impact. It’s the perfect time to DISRUPT the DISRUPTORS!
Now let me pause here for a sec and just say that women don’t always do themselves any favours in the way they try and fix the imbalance. The power of collaboration is much stronger than the power of segregation, but nonetheless, women-only events or assets continue to not only pop up, but also insist on calling themselves ridiculous names that perpetuate the difference. Here’s some local Aussie examples:
A) “Business chicks” (a young woman. — e.g. “she’s a great-looking chick”)
B) “Rare birds” (a young woman or a man’s girlfriend)
C) “Business babes” (a sexually attractive young woman)
Why are women in business shooting themselves in the foot by creating these names whose origins focus on their looks, their age, or who they are in relation to a male? It seems really quite bizarre to me. I should note that neither event A, nor C are tech focussed and the inspiring women who run female-focussed events in the tech industry have come up with much better names!
Unfortunately, these women have yet to convince local men to attend their events. Why? One was told by a male colleague it was because “at those event girls just bitch about guys”. Ego much?
All this leads to another question, why do women feel the need to create women focused events? Is it legitimate? At our first female founders committee held last week, we talked about why each of us became involved. One woman told a story about meeting guy whom she really connected with as they spoke about their business ideas, only to be disappointed and embarrassed when he asked her out at the end of the conversation. She thought she’d found a great colleague, he thought he’d found a hot date. Unfortunately, this is a scenario most women can relate to. It has happened to me more times than I’d like to remember and perhaps it’s also the reason I’ve chosen to block it out. In fact just recently the tech world received a wake up call due to this lawsuit against Tinder cofounder.
In reality, we can’t block out stuff we don’t like to think about or that we personally don’t experience as a problem. We need to face these operational issues and work together to find ways of dealing with them. On top of the example above, other reasons cited for non-attendance included:
– I don’t drink beer and I don’t want to eat pizza
– I feel nervous and intimidated by all the guys
– I don’t feel confident
Every leader in ecosystem has a role to play to bring the community together: from meet ups to big events, hackathons to incubators, accelerators and VC’s. I don’t believe it is apathy that stalls change, but a lack of deep understanding — understanding that only requires simple conversations with your target market to create and maintain.
Just as an example, as corporate Australia was looking for ways to increase the number of women on boards, they found one example that stood out as having a marked impact. It was something SO simple: to have the board position job description explicitly state “No prior experience necessary”. Of course! By not stating this, or by stating that experience was necessary, simply perpetuated the cycle as women felt they could not apply. In hindsight it seems like a no-brainer.
Female only events are one great way the community tries to deal with this imbalance, but it cannot be the only way because there is a risk of perpetuating segregation. Private girls and boys schools wax lyrical about the benefits of segregated learning — but there seems to be a variety of compelling evidence for both camps. So why should a community need to choose? Why not have and support both, and instead allow individuals to choose the pathway that suits their learning and achievement style?
Of course, there’s a long way to go, but here’s what I’m committing to doing both personally and through the female founders committee at Startup Victoria:
1. Attend all local female focused tech startup meetups and chat with women about their aspirations and their barriers/challenges in attending ‘co-ed’ events.
2. Speak directly with each leader in the ecosystem about their current female participation baseline and their learnings, insights, challenges to date.
3. Create and present an agreed set of best practice standards on how to better engage women in tech based on those insights, and provide support for each part of the local ecosystem to implement that change.
4. Present at all female only events once changes begun implementation to encourage their participation in cross gender events and programs. Align timelines across the community to reduce crossover.
5. Speak with educational institutions about career pathways available. Talk about their challenges in getting women into key tech and biz programs. Then speak with high school students to understand what their barriers are.
6. Touch base with successful female and male founders, VC’s and successful leaders across Melbourne, Victoria, Australia and the globe to secure a swathe if mentors keen to support local female founders (both male and female mentors).
7. Ensure key male leaders are in the committee or involved in some way, and committed to the change.
8. Create and implement a talent pipeline program for mature leaders through from corporate and younger leaders through from high schools — piloting 3 schools to start (one regional, 2 metro).
9. Seek funding for this very carefully planned process of community change — it’s not about big flashy events …it’s about real results, real numbers, numbers that matter.
35 years ago (when my mother was 20) there were still women living who were 20 at the time women actually got to vote! And that’s just Australia who was the 2nd nation to allow women to vote. Other countries had to wait much longer and in Saudi Arabia women still have no vote. It’s crazy how we think it’s so long ago…when it’s really not. To deny that there is any possible bias that exists today that might be creating the current status quo of gender imbalance in the tech world is to deny our very short human history!
So, what’s the first rule about fight club? There is no fight club. What is the ultimate goal of the female founders committee? That in time, there IS no female founders committee. We should be aiming to no longer be needed in 5 years because BALANCE becomes the status quo. Using Melbourne as an example of how to change communities.
I first joined the Melbourne tech startup community because I felt isolated as a small business owner and wanted to connect with other people like me. Over the last year I fulfilled that need. Now, I am a part of Startup Victoria because I want to be inspired to take risks, to be a better leader, to feel the buzz and excitement of trying new successful ideas, and to humbly learn when we try things that don’t work out.
If you are a person who connects with any of this blog post and is interested in being involved as a mentor, sponsor or volunteer in the Female Founders Committee, or the general Membership Committee for Startup Victoria, please get in touch with me directly at [email protected].
The Startup Victoria Female Founders Committee thanks AngelCube for its $10k donation to help us carry out our plans. The Committee currently consists of the following members and is actively seeking male participants:
- Michelle Bourke, CEO of Artlivemedia & Founder of Bambi
- Marina Paronetto, Founder of Powerhouse HQ
- Richenda Vermeulen, Founder of Ntegrity
- Maia Bryant, Founder of LKBK
- Julie Bray, Founder of Konnective
- Pheobe Yu, Founder of Ettitude
- Nadine Parkington, Partner, Think Nimble
- Wendy Kozica, Board Member, Scale Investors
- Hima, Organiser, Girl Geek
- Madeleine Judge, Organiser, Startup Weekend Women + Melbourne Women Founders
- Tessa Court, CEO, IntelligenceBank (Mentor for Springboard Pathway)