Sorry guys, I had to get you to listen too.
Check this out:
- Less than 2% of the applications that I’ve received for Techstars have even a single female founder.
- I’d estimate that less than 5% of the 100 or so companies I’ve covered so far on this blog have any female founders.
- Why does the public safety company that I founded (ZOLL Data Systems) have just a handful of women in the software engineering group of 50 or so people and none in the IT group?
We’re fortunate to have the National Center for Women & Information Technology right here in our back yard. I’m glad they’re asking interesting questions like “Why do women receive less than five percent of the funding to start IT firms?” and “Why do they lag behind men in moving their ideas out of the university and into the marketplace?” It’s always puzzled me why more women aren’t founding hi-tech companies.
I was interested to read NCWIT’s first in a series of four articles on this topic which discusses gender differences in firm size, growth, and persistence of IT companies. It hadn’t occurred to me that perhaps women simply have differing intentions from men, perhaps in many cases being more likely to bootstrap, grow slowly, and not seek total world domination in quite the same fashion as men seem to do.
I’m quite interested the final two of the four articles to be released in the coming weeks, which are titled “Gender differences in access to capital for starting a business” and “Psychological factors related to IT entrepreneurship.” I’ll be watching NCWIT’s site for the next three articles over the course of the next three weeks.
