What do you do to attract more women to work at your startup?

3 points·estherschindler··5 comments

...if you do anything at all?

This is for an article at CIO.com, in which I'm hoping to share "things you can do to attract more IT women" (rather than tell more horror stories even though, face it, we all do love to read them).

Private comments to eschindler at cio dot com are okay, too.

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At the risk of sounding glib, I've found that asking people with the right skillset who happen to be of the female persuasion works pretty well. I got the 33% of our team (1/3) to join by saying "So, Meagan, interested in helping Mike and I start a company?"

I think startups are so desperate for good cofounders/early employees that they just don't care one way or another about the sex, race, etc. of the candidates... that's been my experience, anyway.

It really depends on what the questioner means by “startup”. If you’ve raised an angel or VC round, you might have the luxury of worrying about such things,

Nothing. You hire the best person for the job, regardless of sex. If you worry about this, you're doomed to fail because you're wasting time on things that don't matter to the business.

In case anybody cares, the article for which this was research is live:

Making Your IT Department More Attractive to Women Want more women on your staff? You need to do more than offer family-friendly employee benefits. Women at every level of the career ladder describe the corporate behavior that can attract them to a company—or chase them away. http://www.cio.com/article/325513

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