What Stops Female Founders?

When the author writes out all the sacrifices needed, it makes it look incredibly hard. And, in fact, starting a startup is in general a very long slog. What makes it worth while is the prospect of asymmetric returns (either in money or in future freedom).

If you had asked my mom at age 30 (before she had me), "What would you do if you had enough money that you didn't have to work?". She would have probably said something like: "Well, I would have kids and stay at home and take care of them. As they grew up, I would love to work more with the catholic church, because that means a lot to me." And in fact, my mom ended up not needing to work, and doing exactly that. But she did not need to make the sacrifices Jessica lists above, nor did spend four years schlepping away at a startup. Instead she just got married to solid, hard working fellow who was happy to be the primary breadwinner.

So perhaps one reason women don't do startups as much, is because they do not need to. It's still far more socially normal for the guy to be the primary breadwinner, and many guys are very willing to work and have their wife stay at home. Since women have a greater ability to leave the workforce or opt out of lousy job (since their family is less dependent on their pay check), women have less of a need to pin their hopes on a risky startup in order to escape the rat race.

"I wanted to do x, but no one would hire me even though I was capable because I didn’t have sufficient experience in x on my resume."

I definitely identify with this line. I'm a 27-year-old woman and I left a cushy (read: boring) job writing for Vogue magazine so I could create a dating site that women will actually feel proud to join. Like so many, I was under the assumption you had to have ninja coding skills, an MBA, Google on your resume, or a genius gene to become a founder. I had none of those, and having worked as a print journalist, I missed the boat on the importance of developing your online brand. I had nothing to give me credibility--not even a Twitter page. And let's face it, my one laurel, ie that shiny "Vogue" on my resume, meant nothing to this audience.

I tried to get a job at a startup just to see what I was getting myself into, and no one would hire me. I had pretty much one friend in the biz--Meetup's cofounder Matt Meeker--and once he heard my idea, he said, "You've got to do this." I said, "But I don't have experience or any sort of reputation," and he said, "The best and most efficient way to get those things is to just do it."

So, I'm doing it. I probably wouldn't have if Matt hadn't offered those words of wisdom and created such an unthreatening environment in which to pitch him. The other thing that helped me plow forward when I wanted to give in to all the judgmental haters out there was the research I did on what sort of skills investors look for in the entrepreneurs they fund. If more women knew that it's about PERSPIRATION and PERSEVERANCE above all, I truly believe we'd have more female founders.

I've always had that fire in the belly that makes for a good entrepreneur. If it weren't for the misconceptions that you have to be some sort of savant to start something, I would have, like Jessica, maybe done this at 25. Though I've got a lot of catching up to do, I'm so thankful I realized I CAN do this, I SHOULD do this (to gain experience if nothing else), and I WANT to do this--because if I pull this off, I'll have accomplished something 100x more gratifying than anything I could have ever done working in corporate.

The vast majority of people are not founders.

So, instead of asking "what stops 99.99% of women from founding [ ... and 99.98% of men ]", I think it might be more productive to ask "what causes 0.015 of people to become founders".

The women founders that I know would answer very simply: 'absolutely nothing'.

To top it off they're collectively much further ahead than the men, even if there are far fewer of them.

Most women that I know balk at one simple item: loss of security. They like their paycheck and the lack of worries that come with it and they see running a company as going to war. And it's been traditionally the men that go to war.

But when women do decide to go to war they do so with gusto and the female founders that make a go of it typically take no prisoners, they're good at what they do and they'd give any guy or girl a run for their money.

What works for one will not work for all, that's the same in the male as well as in the female world.

JL is not just talking to her past self, she's talking to all the potential female founders out there and her words ring true, only, would she have taken her own advice at the age of 25? That's a thing we'll never know, but lets hope that YC will see a higher number of quality female applicants to prove that these words did not fall on deaf ears.

Interesting anecdote: so far 100% of the female engineers we've tried to hire who've turned us down (four so far...) did so in order to try to start their own startup, for at least a while. Of those two (that's 50%) raised outside capital so far, each just a few months after our offer.

I wonder if this is a fluke, or a result of the massive influx of women into greentech?

[I'm a female]

I'm currently at a point where I feel like I've saved a fair amount of money and could support myself for a while without a steady source of income (with a a relatively inexpensive lifestyle- no car, no house, no family), but I do sometimes worry that I will accidentally get pregnant (shit happens) and what appeared like a substantial amount of savings for one person won't be enough for two.

Anyway, so there's that. But I think I'll swallow that particular paranoia and go for it someday soon anyway. :)

"Duh. Of course no one should live beyond their means. But I’d never thought about the implications of that when I was 25."

I read a while ago that 40% of American households spend more than they make in post-tax income. I imagine this has gone down a bit, but it's still astounding. People are really good at convincing themselves that their "ship will come in" and they'll be able to wipe that debt clean.

My experience from being part of the undergrad recruiting team at a strategy consultant with a "women initiative": Men go hunting, women go picking berries.

Many women don't want to make the time investment strategy/banking/startups require as taking a job as accountant, HR manager or university researcher leaves more time to invest in finding a suitable mate and get children.

IMO in Western culture we go overboard in trying to equalize everything. Many woman seek men earning more than them, and men like being the provider.

It's pretty much the lack of technical ambition (programmers, engineers, etc). I reckon 1% of technical people will attempt to try starting something.

This is an issue in gender-dominated industries. I bet there's a similar article for child care: "What Stops Male Founders?"

Sheryl Sandberg gave a good talk on a very similar topic at Ted. Her conclusion was that women tended to "check out" of work sooner then men.

One example she gave was that when women start trying to get pregnant, they will often stop applying for promotions because they know they'll be leaving work soon.

http://www.ted.com/talks/sheryl_sandberg_why_we_have_too_few...

[Female Founder]

Perhaps the title should read, "What Stops Women from Becoming Founders? I was hoping to read an essay on women who are already founders and their challenges (as the title implies).

I am a founder and will be launching my start-up soon, and I have a newborn. I am truly thankful that I can stay home, take care of my baby and continue working on executing my idea.

I agree with Jessica's points and appreciate her sharing her personal experience, however, there aren't specific to women.

IMO, what can really stop a female founder from pushing their idea through to execution is:

--pregnancy hormones --post-pregnancy hormones --motherhood

Seriously, when facing these three factors, you must be absolutely certain about your idea and driven to keep it moving; especially when it's easier to hold your sweet baby all day and simply throw in the towel.

It's probably a combination of factors that make "the female founder" seem more rare than she actually is.

There is a breed of female founder that lives to pose for cameras and magazine covers and to be mentioned in Valleywag. But more common are those who are happy to grow their companies to a certain point that is manageable enough. They don't want or get a lot of attention, which makes them seem more rare than they actually are.

Maybe the core issue is that females don't tend to form the kind of companies that tend to get really big really fast. Each iteration of a growing company changes the social / cultural dynamic of a company, too; these are areas which females tend to treat with more care.

I wonder if this is more a symptom of having few women in the field of computer science / software engineering [1] than a lack of women who want to be founders [2]. It isn't too surprising when you consider only a small percentage of people in computer science decide to become founders, and then a small percentage of that pool ends up being women.

[1] I am assuming that most people in startups are computer science types. Which isn't entirely (or very) accurate. Certainly when you add in fields like design and business/marketing this really changes.

[2] Of course, being a founder doesn't require restricting oneself to starting a technical business.

Why do many men often have more power than women do in general?

I suspect those are the same reasons that women are less inclined to start a business.

Men are more inclined to leave where they grew up, venture out, confront the unknown, focus on just one thing relentlessly and disagree with the group.

That doesn't mean women don't or can't, just that they are less likely to, for whatever reasons.

One of the things YC could do to help with their horrible 4% ratio is get Hacker News to be less hostile to women. Quite a few women founders have told me how unpleasant they find it here. This thread is a good example of why.

The article title is misleading. After the 4th paragraph, all of the advice is equally relevant to males and females.

If 4% of founders in YC are female I would be interested to know what the breakdown of male/female entrepreneurs are for businesses outside of tech. My initial guess is that there are a lot more female entrepreneurs outside of the valley than there are in the valley. This article (http://www.examiner.com/women-s-entrepreneurship-in-washingt...) would seem to (albeit not definitely) agree with that assumption. So if we think there is a significant difference I would be really interested to see a profile of a female tech entrepreneur and a female non-tech entrepreneur. That profile would reveal a lot about why more women don't create technology startups.

In the end I think women are quite entrepreneurial and can make the sacrifices, tradeoffs, and decisions necessary to succeed. I just don't think the type of businesses that most women are interested in creating are technology in nature.

Great piece by Jessica. It's cool reading this as I'm 25 years old now, even though I'm a guy. Whenever the topic of women entrepreneurs comes to mind though, I always think of Rose Blumkin - http://www.buffettsecrets.com/rose-blumkin-nebraska-furnitur...

She was Buffett's most favorite founder at Berkshire Hathaway. Granted that she's quite the outlier (started her first business when she was 44 and then worked 7 days/week until the age of 104!), she's a clear-cut example of someone who defies the stereotype. She's one of the most hardcore founders I have ever read about. Another great piece on her life: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/08/13/business/rose-blumkin-reta...

"Put her up against the top graduates of the top business schools or chief executives of the Fortune 500 and, assuming an even start with the same resources, she'd run rings around them" - Buffett

Men and women have different chromosomes, organs, lifespans, brain chemistry[1], expressed genes[2], and the list goes on.

In particular, they also had/have substantially different risk/reward payoff functions. A man who risks all could potentially have thousands[3] of descendants if his bet pays off. A woman will have, at most, a few dozen children.

There are good mathematical models [4] of evolution (as well as data from mammals closely related to humans) that show that a high risk/high reward strategy is going to be differentially selected in males, where there isn't a lifetime reproduction cap.

The genome is upon us. We will soon need to stop ignoring biology.

  [1] http://brizlab.ucsf.edu/brizlab/home.html
  [2] http://adaptivecomplexity.blogspot.com/2006/07/gene-expression-differences-in-males.html
  [3] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article444767.ece
  [4] Google Scholar starting with "Male Reproductive Skew"

A disproportionately low percentage of female founders in IT/tech startups might be due to a lower number of female CS/engineering graduates and workers.

However, in biology and medicine, I believe women are now the majority of new graduates. Yet, the majority of biotech and pharma startup founders are men (and I believe the stats are that an even higher percentage of biotech startups have male founders than cs/internet startups!). Biotech startups are more capital intensive, and have an entirely different funding and exit profile, but I think this is a useful data point. Qualified women are still not starting startups at the rate one would predict; maybe they are rational in choosing not to, maybe there are artificial barriers which can be removed (even something as simple as lack of awareness that of founding startups as a possibility), but it's definitely an issue.

First of all let me start by saying that I dislike articles such as this for many reasons but mainly because research is few and far between and most arguments turn into a 81 cents argument (i e there is obviously discrimination a foot). [by the way 81 cents on the dollar is the amount women earn annually compared to men, not sure if that needed explanation]

Anyway, here's my opinion on the subject. I had a very bright economics teacher in collage who had many terribly enlightening stories [read most boring but some nuggets of pure gold]. Among them, he said once that some people just arn't cut out for owning a business. Anyone can operate a business, just not many people can deal with the amount of risk associated with owning a business. This teacher likened it to being able to sleep at night knowing there was a chance however small that your company would burn down that night. Some people just can't do it.

Anyway, this article pretty much gave a very long list of reasons why to AVOID starting a company. Mainly, because its hard, there is a great deal of risk, oh yeah and its really hard.

Why do women seldom start companies? Why are there seldom women firefighters? I don't know, because its a damn dirty job and they just don't want to do it. Nothing wrong with that, plenty of men don't want to be firefighters and for that matter entrepreneurs. Its stressful, its hard, and just as often as you hear about facebook hitting it big you can count off dozens of companies that fail every year.

The question isn't why don't we have more women, the question is why do we have so many men?

My own two cents on the "finding a technical co-founder" section: Be aware of the differences between actual software development and normal IT work.

While there are quite a few IT people who are very good at programming and even do it as part of their job, the skills required for maintaining a server farm and developing an application are very different.

Of course, anyone with strong skills in both IT and development is likely to be a hero in a small startup. :-)

I'm part of a startup where the lead founder is female. When she had the idea, she formed the team, applied for accelerators (including YC) and looked for funding. No one took her seriously. So she pulled it off anyway -- it soft launches next month -- but I can understand how others might get discouraged. Until there are more home runs by female founders, it will be an uphill battle for them.

I believe it's simply societal influences. Growing up, young girls follow the influence of older women. Mostly the pop culture nowadays. You have a small portion of female overachievers, but out of the small portion, even a smaller amount would pursue entrepreneurship.

I believe women are just as capable as men in all abilities, but ever since the nascence of civilization, women just had a different role. As society progress, the roles have shifted a bit, but the overall theme is still relatively similar as thousands of years ago. Nothing stops female founders except for themselves.

Im told that startups are very risky, low chnce of success. I'm also told that females are more risk averse than men. I'm not sure if that's true but what you could do is: look at other high risk fields, and see if women make more or less than 4% of the demographic.

Of course I suppose startups aren't risky in the sense of life threatening.

Women have different & distinct priorities in life.

There are lots and lots and LOTS of female entrepreneurs who start all kinds of business. I know - I searched aggressively for women entrepreneurs to see if I could find any who met my criteria, so I could invite them to speak at my conference.

Many women innovate in fields they're interested in, including physical goods manufacture. Many women start social-oriented web sites (not nec. products). Incredible amounts of women are freelancers, consultants, coaches, trainers, writers, etc.

There are hundreds of thousands of western, middle-class women who work as much if not more than the mythical "startup founder" -- on other business endeavors.

This pretty much invalidates the "women don't want to start companies" and "women don't want to work much" theories.

The question is, why don't they do product businesses?

I have a "tech startup." This time a year ago, it was bringing in $3k a month. Now it's $15k. By the end of the next 12 mos, it'll be earning nearly half a million dollars a year. I'm not living off ramen and working 90 hour weeks - to the contrary, I spend maybe 20% time on the app and my husband & I have apartments in Vienna, Austria and Philadelphia, NYC, and a really nice car ;)

That's why I'm trying to bring the products gospel to people (including women) who would otherwise stay employed or start consulting businesses.

I think that women, on average, are more interested in different fields than men. But products cut across all fields.

PS - And before you ask - no, my husband is not a breadwinner. He and I both quit consulting to work on our apps & products. The money ideas are almost always mine.)

I do complain about working too much on Twitter, but that's because I've had a low-grade chronic illness for the past 1.5 yrs and it's got me down. I probably work about 30-40 hours a week average. Sometimes it's 50, and sometimes it's 10.

How many male English majors are founding companies?

I would think being an English major is the first problem, you need more women in CS/Engineering first.

i read this despite expecting it to be yet another whine about how women are oppressed (rather than, gosh, just different) and was pleasantly surprised to find it was a pretty good and helpful piece on startup and career advice.