There aren't, as far as I can tell, any real barriers to women starting a tech company; being able to code, having a lot of mental resilience and having some starting capital is not something that's only possible if you're male.
Yes and no. Just as Paul Graham often says that there could be more startups than there are, and that would be a good thing, I suspect there can be a lot more female-founded startups, and that would also be a good thing. The goal is to have more successful startups, and from the numbers, it looks like there's many women who might otherwise have created a successful company, but don't start one because of lack of awareness/society pressures/etc.
In other words, just like pg tries to get more people to try entrepreneurship with his essays, by raising awareness and showing it is possible, more concentrated efforts to raise awareness are needed for groups who are also likely to succeed, but who are harder to get to.
[1] Think about the 50's and 60's--there were tons of companies almost entirely run by men who produced lots of products used almost exclusively by women. You have to wonder how well they really understood their customers.
While it would be difficult to A/B test, I rather suspect that the Y chromosome is not depressing my conversion rates.
It must be my dirty mind at work.
A quote comes to mind: "You are not your target market". This is as true of women selling to women as it is for men selling to women.
Those companies in the 50's and 60's you refer to probably did perfectly well for themselves as long as they were listening to (and learning from) their customers.
Young, single guys don't like having all of their coworkers also be guys? (Especially if they work crazy hours and are a bit light on social skills.)
Having more women in the field would make it more socially acceptable?
A bigger industry is better? (What about the industries we'd be stealing the women from?)
More competition is better? (Even when you're the one being competed against?)
Maybe having more women is a sign that the industry has become socially acceptable, or that we've learned better social skills, or something?
Maybe "women" here is really a stand-in for some larger group that wants our perceived salaries without our perceived social sacrifices?
i.e., I suspect it's not really about the women at all...
To expand, Women are still a minority in a lot of areas of work where physical differences are mostly unimportant-E.g. truck driving, skilled construction workers (carpenters/electricians), etc. Other engineering fields (eg EE) are similarly male-dominated, but being an EE or whatever isnt "sexy" in the way tech is, so it doesnt get as much attention. By "sexy" I mean the software industry has lots of high-paying jobs, growth, job security (if you are good at what you do), and, most importantly, publicity. Facebook essentially didnt exist 6 years ago, now they have 500m users every tiny change they make is "big" news. If you can create your own company (which , relative to other industries, is incredibly easy to do), you get lots more money and publicity. This makes it a popular target for the "Why arent there more women in industry x" discussion.
I conclude that doctors, bankers, marketing executives, writers, poets, dukes, slaveholding Southerners, vampires, werewolves, and Catholic priests are all seen as more desirable than engineers are.
"And over here is Duke Smith, Lord of Databases, who rules over over data warehouse, and whose rippling pecs shine like the morning dew..." uh, sorry, got off track there.
I am female, and have never read a Harlequinn romance novel. None of my female friends have read them, either. None of my older female relatives have read them either. (I'm not saying some people aren't reading them. Just that they're like daytime soap operas: Cheap enough to make, and popular enough to survive, but not necessarily relevant.)
Must be something wrong with my friends and me. Lately many of us have been crushing out on guys who work at coffee shops.
But my point is this: There is such a thing as sub-culture. This means not everybody likes the same stuff. To put it in start-up terms: it's the long tail... of attraction.
This is 2010, people. :D
#dowatchalike
Material like that will cater to it's audience. Then the only question is, who is it's audience and do they represent a significant portion of the greater whole we are trying to study.
The Long Tail taught us that the single most popular thing still has less people into it than not into it.
Medicine and Law has more prestige.
And, thanks to economic protectionism, a largely guaranteed source of white collar income. Programming is much riskier.
* your family & friends will be able to grasp what you do
* on average, in those fields you can have a much greater positive impact on other people than you can employed developer
* your field is insulated by the need for education - you don't have to worry about 16-year-olds who think working 20 hour days is fun
* codes of professionalism (whether or not they're slavishly followed)
* regulatory boards that can and do eject bad apples
* very hard to outsource to India or other destination du jour
* law firms and medical practices don't go boom and bust as often as tech firms do
I'm a female developer and I honestly don't care... but then again, I've made myself impossible to compete with. I'd also gnaw off my own leg before working in a corporate tech environment.
Let's face it -- the movie that sums up the life of a corporate developer best is _Office Space_. The IT Crowd doesn't make it much more appealing.
Meanwhile, lawyers and doctors and biotech and all sorts of other fields where there are more women -- they get the awesome shows and movies.
Further, everything you just said applies equally well to any sort of professional engineer (i.e., the kind where you get certified) or to actuaries. Those fields exhibit a lack of women similar to CS.
That's it! We need the IT port of House!
After listening to a med student and a pharmacy student discuss what they've been doing while on rotations, I'm not entirely certain this is true.
Whether or not there are barriers is irrelevant to whether or not they will clamor for their 'fair share'.