One of the age-old challenges women have faced is how much help to expect from other women. Although we found a significant number of women who said they’d had negative or mediocre experiences with female supervisors or colleagues, overall we see leadership and funding circles—by and for female innovators—reshaping the game.
There’s a trend of women reaching out to build new networks, organizations, and systems for women to assist each other. Women in the fields of STEM have used both formal and informal systems to support each other in their careers, entrepreneurship, and educational goals. But how far women’s networking can go in helping to change the game is yet to come.
Technology has become not only a discipline and a job field, but a dream that draws talent toward it. Shaherose Charania was born in Canada and studied business and technology at the University of Western Ontario. In 2005, she took a leap of faith that would change her life. A friend sold her on the idea of going to Silicon Valley. She had a job interview…but didn’t get the job. Nonetheless, she was so entranced with the energy and vision there that she went to her bank, took out a line of credit, and moved to technology’s Promised Land, the place where Google was growing and Facebook was taking off.
But things weren’t quite what Charania expected. “I arrived here and noticed—it’s weird, but I was the only girl in the room. I started to get to know a lot of investors, and they were funding their friends from college, their guy friends from their dorm rooms.” At the same time, she was watching female entrepreneurs in emerging economies become more educated and sophisticated and gain access to capital through microloans. As they were continuing to grow in power and develop bigger businesses, the role of women was truly changing in these markets, but “they wouldn’t find role models when they looked to the West. Which led to the start of Women 2.0.”
Today, Women 2.0 has served hundreds of thousands of people drawn to its community-created content online as well as its conferences and global community for women innovators (all of their programs are open to men as well). Their mission, as stated, “is to increase the number of female founders, employees, and investors in technology startups with inspiration, education, and connections through our platform.” The project was born of a mix of serendipity and confusion.
“A friend of mine was working at Facebook (before I could even get an account!) and hosting networking events for young entrepreneurs,” said Charania. “Again, I was the only girl. At the third [gathering], he said, ‘I know these two other girls I went to college with who are really into tech. They want to start a company; you should meet,’ and I was like, ‘Really? You wanted us to meet because we’re girls?’”
And that’s exactly how Women 2.0 was launched. Charania also runs Founder Labs, a five-week program for people with new mobile development projects. For years, she ran Women 2.0 as a side project while working full-time as a project manager and designer and later with Founder Labs. In late 2011, the Kauffman Foundation became a major funder, which allowed Charania to devote the majority of her time to Women 2.0.
For women in tech and innovation, “change has already been more than incremental. We’ve seen a rise in the number of people coming to our events around the world,” and a rise in women seeking to become founders or players in key industries. She credits the rise, in part, to the star status of technologists and business leaders like Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, who have become household names. Also, building new products does not require deep technical knowledge anymore, especially if it’s consumer-driven.
“You can learn the code yourself at coding camps. We’re seeing men and women who didn’t have those skills take that leap and join something new,” she said. “And the quality of the startups we see, it’s gone up. I would say in the first one, two, or three years, even, I was like, ‘Oh, man, this is a women-led startup, they don’t think big enough.’ But now they’re on par. If you look at our competitions, companies get funding or acquired. There’s a track record. To see the change in quality to be totally equivalent to what you’d see at a TechCrunch Disrupt is very indicative of the future of women’s roles in innovation.”
There are a variety of ways that women give back to other women. Some, like Charania, start networking organizations; others, including venture capitalist Heidi Roizen, mentor informally. Roizen also teaches at Stanford University, a nexus of tech entrepreneurship, bringing women into an inner circle of future business leaders.
Heidi Roizen traces the gender disparities in venture funding to an earlier point in life: education. “Most Silicon Valley technology venture-funded private companies are founded by engineers, and women have a disproportionately small representation in the people coming out of college with degrees in engineering and computer science. I believe ten years from now we’re going to see a big change, but that takes all of us continuing to push and continuing to encourage women. For example, I teach entrepreneurship classes at Stanford in the engineering department, and I literally recruit and encourage women to come to my classes. My classes are often oversubscribed, and as the instructor, I get to have a big say on who gets in: For the good of the individuals as well as the quality of the class (which is a discussion class), I tip the scale to try to admit as many women as I can. In a class of fifty, I’ve had as low as nine, even though I let all female applicants in. But recently, I had so many women on the list I actually had to turn some away or I would have exceeded fifty out of fifty.” She also lectures in her class about life-work balance, something she feels the men appreciate as well as the women. Roizen believes that established networks are only one part of the picture.
“This morning, a reporter e-mailed me and asked, ‘What women’s groups are you a part of? What are the big campaigns and other initiatives that you’re leading or advocating?’ The truth is I’m not really participating in a lot of formal groups and initiatives. For me, I prefer to use my position, knowledge, and available time to do things more at the individual entrepreneur level. I believe if everybody in positions like mine (male and female, by the way) did more individual ad hoc efforts, we would change the world. For example, I just finished spending a half hour with a female entrepreneur giving her advice. This is not a company that would fit DFJ’s investment criteria, and she was not a Stanford student—I just did it to be helpful to a woman entrepreneur, give her a little extra edge.” Heidi allocates time nearly every day—often during walks near her home—to meet with entrepreneurs, especially female entrepreneurs, hear their stories, and offer advice.
Kimberly Bryant, an engineer who worked at companies including DuPont and Genentech, takes a different approach—running coding classes for girls, often from poor or working-class neighborhoods. “When I started Black Girls Code in 2011, there weren’t any programs that had a foundation in communities of color to teach our kids about technology,” said Bryant, the mother of a young daughter. “So our focus is really to drive this whole conversation around why it’s important for our kids—both girls and boys—to know how to be creative with technology and not just be delegated to being forever just users and consumers of it. It fosters that conversation not only with the youth, but also within their communities, with their parents, and within their schools.”
There are many computer summer camps and enrichment programs available to teens these days—including ones targeting girls, but some of these teen tech camps can cost up to $1,000 per week. Black Girls Code, which is funded partly by foundations, can charge as little as $150 for a six-week session.
Among the contributors in our forum we found robust discussions of the different ways women can help each other in this field, the value of male mentors, and even some critiques of whether women are supportive enough of each other in the field. Megan Groves, a digital marketing consultant and startup mentor said, “I've had a long list of mentors over the years myself—in academia, business, and for general life guidance—and most have been men. Several live in different cities, but we’ve kept in touch with regular Skype calls and in-person meetings when we find ourselves in the same area. I’ve seen that many men have a genuine interest in helping bring out the best in the women around them, even when other women may or may not share that desire. I think it’s important to seek out women to trust and learn from, but I also believe in accepting support where we can find it.”
Yinka Abdu, founder of the online fashion platform Suede Lane, said, “Along with many others, I’ve found that women are not necessarily supportive of each other in the workplace. I’ve also found that in the same way that some people like the concept of humanity more than the reality of actually helping humans, some women only pay lip service to the issue of mentorship. They may proclaim (even publicly) to want to help others, yet approaching them or trying to follow up after meeting leads to a dead end. Sad because more female mentorship (especially earlier in one’s career, before getting better at spotting B.S.) would help reduce the frequency of incidences where some men don’t take you seriously, or their offers of help have ulterior motives, like hitting on you.”
Susan Baxter, the executive director of the California State University Program for Education and Research in Biotechnology, was mentored by men while she worked in private industry. “But in the academic part of my career path, a group of us women faculty started having lunch together once a month as our tenure decisions loomed ever closer. Actually, I think 80 percent of the junior women faculty at the institution met for these lunches; there were no tenured women at our location. We became close friends, politically savvy, and quite brave and empowered. I think we all look back on those lunches as important to all of us gaining tenure.”
Saru Mahajan, a manager at Sapient Nitro, found that some of the formal women’s interest groups provided community, but not leverage. “I felt they did not provide the critical ‘resources’ for women to move to the next step. By resources, I mean introductions to key people in the industry, support for promotions, ideas to gain capital investment, etc.” Nonetheless, she still found the emotional bonding useful.
In other cases, though, women mentors have crucially changed their protégé’s careers. Feben Yohannes, the cofounder of GlobalStudent Social, relates the story of what happened as she sought to reboot her career after moving to the United States.
“During my early stage of redefining my life in the United States, I applied for a position at a company that I knew I was overqualified for and yet had a really hard time even getting an interview. Finally, I reached out to this phenomenal senior executive who, as a woman and a mother, instantly connected with me and made it a mission to get me to an interview process. A chance was all I needed to prove my abilities, and less than a year into that job, I was one of ten receiving an award from a pool of 1,200. Sometimes just a slight crack of the door is all that we need to bust through and show our worth, and if we can multiply that gesture for a few folds, then the ripple effect will be significant.”
For Phaedra Pardue, cloud and content consultant at Sohonet Media Network, community can take many forms—from real-life friendships to the circle of contributors we gathered for this book.
“My work colleagues have, in many cases, turned into some of my best friends: Sylvia Oglesbee, Susan Rossi, and Carmen Campbell are all exceptionally accomplished women that have succeeded even when they were dealt a difficult hand. I could not have made it as far as I have without their wisdom, advice, logic, passion, and expertise,” she said. “We have organized ways to celebrate and bring women together with women’s wisdom dinner parties, where we each lean in and share our collective stories, much like we are doing here in this forum of the Innovating Women project. My favorite mentor is my mother-in-law, Madalene Simons, who was one of the first female stockbrokers (the financial industry is another notoriously male-dominated business). While she always looks picture-perfect in her lovely suits and petite frame, she packs a powerful presence that was undeniably a game changer in her industry. In fact, I knew her long before I ever met my husband, as we both belonged to Portlandia, a women’s networking group for female business executives in Portland, Oregon. If I could give any advice to those starting their career, find a group of like-minded people to connect with. It has made all the difference for me.”