Ah! A mini Battle of the Sexes! Fun!
Let’s try to get the timeline from the weekend straight:
- The Wall Street Journal posts an article about the lack of women as start-up founders, etc. and notes the emergence and growth of organizations dedicated to discovering and backing female talent in the tech and social media start-up scenes. (Do you know I spent about a minute trying to find ways to not say, “seeking out”, “nurturing” or “supporting” as they struck me as too feminine? Yipes.)
- This Journal piece quotes Rachel Sklar saying it’d be nice if TechCrunch came from a worldview in which it could detect the gender imbalance at its conferences (also, “imbalance” is a very polite euphemism in most of these articles; we should be honest, the number of women being backed by VCs or invited to speak at conferences is absurdly small… and again I avoided words like “distressingly”, “appallingly” or “shockingly” because they sounded too emotional to me.)
- Michael Arrington goes, as my dad would have said, apeshit. I would describe it a little differently – I’d say he threw a hissyfit. He focused in on Rachel Sklar, who was clearly using TechCrunch as a ‘for-instance’, painted her with every ‘woman scorned’ brush he could conjure, and then used someone else’s statements to imply something about women’s innate inferiority because he was too much of a sissy to simply say it. (Oh, and yes, I am aware that I am doing the same. It’s called ‘parody.’)
I’ve followed the thread as far as I can – the comments are over 600 when last I looked – and yeah it’s mean and nasty and inaccurate and anecdotal and all that. It is, after all, the comments.
But there are three things that stand out as – no, there isn’t another word for it – dismaying about the tone and tenor of the comments. The first is the immediate leap to a discussion of biology and evolution – that female CEOs are not often on the cover of Fast Company because of neural pathways or biological imperatives. The second is the assumption that there is something in the world of technology that makes it uniquely meritocratic, void of -isms of any kind. And the third is that people’s ‘personal experiences’ make them qualified to speak about gender bias, neuro-biology, social structures, or their own ability to perceive ‘imbalances’ in participation, recognition and reward between the sexes.
First, it’s not about brain function or hormones. I have not done the research, but how many of the top CEOs of tech firms have some form of learning, attentive or cognitive disability? Richard Branson, John Chambers, and Steve Jobs are dyslexic. Ted Turner has bipolar disorder. David Neeleman spoke of ADHD as a major asset. Paul Orfalea has both dyslexia and ADHD. To use the easy retort from the comment thread, these are ‘outliers’ – but they’re just the ones I could find in a brief google search, and are nevertheless highly successful outliers. Even if some have been ousted, as Neeleman, they were still highly successful men with learning or emotional disabilities who manage to find incredible success as entrepreneurs. Being a woman, last I checked, was not a condition listed in the DSM-IV, and yet the commenters treat having two X chromosomes as akin to a learning disability when it comes to math, science and engineering. Let’s not use ‘science’ to camouflage prejudice; doing so has a very unhappy history.
Second, the notion that there is any industry, any business, any enterprise (words that all connote the exchange of goods and services for capital) that is entirely and purely meritocratic is, frankly, silly. Where one is from, what schools one attended, how much support from family one has financially and otherwise, and how much skin one can put in the game are, at the very least, class indicators; they are also factors contributing to the success of a start-up. Being the smartest guy in the room doesn’t make you the richest or best connected or most likely to get an angel; but being rich and well connected can compensate a great deal for not being that smart.
For one thing, VCs are interested in serial entrepreneurs – they want someone in the role of CEO who has both succeeded and failed. Many years ago, Mike Jones was the CEO of a small web design company (disclosure: I worked for him as Creative Director, he fired me, we never reconciled). That company was forced to liquidate as a consequence of a variety of (what I’ll simply call) bad decisions. Today he is CEO of MySpace. His failure was rewarded with greater successes. He is not alone. Most serial entrepreneurs have a failure under their belts. This is not a bad thing – risk-taking requires that sometimes the risk will not pay off. That’s what makes it a risk.
For another, Harvard and Stanford grads and drop-outs get more VC money than anyone else, and Harvard still edges out Stanford, according to a recent study. Recipients of VC dollars are white, male, and affluent. They are well-connected, mostly to others like them. And there is also some evidence to suggest that men are more likely to become entrepreneurs or enter risky fields because they have the financial support of their families/parents. Mike Jones’ father owned a URL called “investing.com” – this was a location of immense value to a lot of people; his business partner Jason Bernstein was closely connected with the Milkens and other wealthy families in LA and elsewhere who were interested in what could be done with investing.com (according to a whois search, it now belongs to an LA law firm). While there, I helped to pitch and win a contract with Ron Herman, owner of the Melrose location of Fred Segal; our entree came through our new business lead who had once tutored Ron’s children. Nepotism got us a long way. There’s a reason the cliche, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is a cliche.
Finally, people are – and this is true of both genders – remarkably bad at identifying their own prejudices. I know this from years working with and using market research; but I also know it from what scientists can tell us about socialized behavior and brain function. Our ability to ‘reason’ is shot through with all sorts of heuristics, shortcuts, and biases that are not rational at all, and are often wildly inaccurate. We make generalizations, we construct narratives, we make decisions we are entirely unaware of, and we engage in patterns of behavior we did not consciously construct. Speaking as a woman recently diagnosed and now treated for ADD, who helped to get her father diagnosed with ADHD, who has lived with and grown up with people who have ADD or ADHD, I – who can correctly identify a person with ADD within about a day of knowing them – was completely unable or unwilling to see the traits in my own behavior. We just aren’t wired to see ourselves accurately. So while your personal anecdotes provide color and big wide targets other commenters can fire at, they don’t meaningfully add to the discourse on the role of gender in guiding the make-up of tech or social media start-ups.
There is much more to say on this matter – and more interestingly and usefully lots to do about it – but as an initial matter, I found myself wrapped up, and then disgusted, by the nature, tone, and substance of the ‘debate’ that is happening so far. The one emotion I didn’t experience, however, was surprise.
(NOTE: I’ll be adding links in the morning. I’m tired. Sue me.)