Innovating women : the changing face of technology

259 Pages·2014·1.46 MB·English

by  Wadhwa

Innovating Women
The Changing Face of Technology
Vivek Wadhwa & Farai Chideya
Copyright
Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008
New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com
Copyright © 2014 by Vivek Wadhwa
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof
in any form whatsoever.
For more information, email [email protected]
First Diversion Books edition September 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62681-383-0
Also by Vivek Wadhwa
The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture
Entrepreneurial Talent
Also by Farai Chideya
Trust: Reaching the 100 Million Missing Voters and Other Selected Essays
The Color of Our Future: Race in the 21st Century
Don’t Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation About African
Americans
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Growing Success of Innovating Women
Women Are the Great Disruptors: Whitney Johnson
Innovating Women in History
Early On: Sian Morson
Chapter 2: Woman to Woman
That Special Place in Hell: Lynn Tilton
The Virtuous Circle
Chapter 3: Educate to Innovate
Disrupting My Way Through Life: Deborah Mills-Scofield
How I Kept Going: Anasilvia Salazar
Getting to the Ivory Tower
Chapter 4: Women for the World
Life Lessons from a Mexican Village: Leticia Jáuregui Casanueva
Giving Back
Homeward Bound—Celebrating Future Makers: Lakshmi Pratury
Chapter 5: The Balancing Act
The Misadventures of Motherhood and Management: S. Mitra Kalita
Career, Community, and Family
Chapter 6: Advancing Women
An African-American Woman’s Shock and Dismay in Silicon Valley: TD
Lowe
The Female Tax
Letting Women Do Their Jobs: Kim Polese
It’s Different for Girls: Heidi Roizen
Boots on the Ground
Overcoming Discrimination with Guts, Grit, and Goodwill: Sujata Srinivasan
Chapter 7: Women Changing the Workplace
How Differences in Leadership Styles Are Explained Through: Gender
Shazia Siddiqi
Changing the Game
Why Female Managers Need to Take the Lead: Carrie-Anne Mosley
Finding the Fit
Chapter 8: Women Affecting Funding
How an Investment Banker Achieved Success as an Entrepreneur: Deborah
Jackson
The Confidence to Lead
Chapter 9: Transforming the System
Quotas: Daniella Alpher
The Big Picture
Chapter 10: How the Tech Industry Is Changing—And How We Can Make It
Better: Vivek Wadhwa
Chapter 11: Looking to the Future: Vivek Wadhwa
From Pondering on the Mysteries of the Universe to Solving the Problems of
Health Using Micromachines: Dr. Anita Goel
To the Stars: Anousheh Ansari
Chapter 12: We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For: Mary Grove and
Megan Smith
Endnote: An Ode To Women Like You Transforming the World: Farai Chideya
Acknowledgments
Introduction
At the 2009 TechCrunch Crunchies Awards—the Oscars of the tech industry—
my wife, Tavinder, asked a question that confused me. “Vivek, do you notice
something strange?”
“Yes,” I whispered excitedly. “Mark Zuckerberg is sitting next to us.”
She smiled indulgently and said, “Try again.”
I looked around and said, “All the celebrities are dressed in ragged jeans and
T-shirts?”
“No, Vivek,” she said. “Where are the women?”
That one comment opened my eyes to an ugly reality: just as no women were
featured on stage at the Crunchies other than the TechCrunch staff and one
circus performer, the entire tech world was male-dominated. Suddenly I saw that
the place I’d been touting as the world’s greatest meritocracy had deep-rooted
biases, which were systematically discriminating against the most innovative
half of our population.
For years, I had been researching entrepreneurship, immigration, and what
made Silicon Valley tick. With the help of noted academics, such as UC
Berkeley dean AnnaLee Saxenian and Harvard economist Richard Freeman, my
research teams at Duke University had published several groundbreaking
academic papers. But I was so oblivious to the issue of gender that I didn’t even
record the sex of the thousands of entrepreneurs we had researched. Just as I
hadn’t noticed the gender gap at the TechCrunch event, it hadn’t even occurred
to me that there could be differences between male and female entrepreneurs.
I was ignorant.
I started looking at Silicon Valley from this new perspective, and I saw that
the executive teams of the Valley’s top tech firms had very few, if any, women
technology heads. The entire management team of Apple didn’t have a single
woman. Virtually all of Silicon Valley’s investment firms were male-dominated.
The few women found on their websites were either in marketing or human
resources. Venture capital firms, or VCs, were the worst offenders—of the
eighty-nine VCs on the 2009 TheFunded.com list of top VCs, only one was a
woman.
I began to take note of the myths and flaws and harmful stereotypes that are
commonly propagated by the technology industry’s power brokers. One such
comment was from a legendary venture capitalist who I have always held in the
highest regard and who I don’t believe is sexist. Yet he said at a major
conference:
In the early days, when you went back in the Amazon shipping area,
the books were lined up so you could see what people were buying.
Invariably there was a book about programming language like
Java, and in the same sales order, there was a book like The Joy of
Sex. These [customers] were probably very clearly male, nerds who
had no social or sex lives trying to get help by using an online
service.
That correlates more with any other success factor that I’ve seen
in the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. If you look at [Amazon
founder Jeff] Bezos, or [Netscape Communications Corporation
founder Marc] Andreessen, [Yahoo! Inc. cofounder] David Filo, the
founders of Google, they all seem to be white, male, nerds who’ve
dropped out of Harvard or Stanford, and they absolutely have no
social life. So when I see that pattern coming in—which was true of
Google—it was very easy to decide to invest.
There was no public outcry about these comments, no apology, no retraction.
In other industries, there would have been an uproar, but in tech, discrimination
on sex, race, and age was considered acceptable.
VCs commonly claimed they knew an entrepreneur when they saw one. And
sadly, it was—and still is—acceptable for venture capitalists to openly tout their
supposed “pattern recognition” abilities. But the patterns they saw were always
young, white, male nerds resembling the founders above—and the VCs
themselves. As such, “pattern recognition” is nothing more than a legitimized
way of discriminating against women and minorities, which has no place in
business or society in this day and age.
There is innovation—the spark that prompts an idea, concept, or company. And
then there is implementation—which requires capital. And that is what skews the
gender balance even more. Implementing ideas has—so far—required
significant amounts of capital. Venture capitalists have controlled access to this
capital.
As tech guru and angel investor Esther Dyson explains, “VCs tend to invest
in people who look like themselves, whether it’s color, whether it’s gender,
whether it’s social class. It’s hard to know who can be successful, so they tend to
work with the familiar, and that leaves out most women,” she said.
To get a better understanding of the root of the gender problem, I decided to
reanalyze data from my own studies on entrepreneurship. I did web searches and
made phone calls to verify the gender of several hundred entrepreneurs whom
my team had researched, and I was surprised to learn that there was virtually no
difference between successful male and female entrepreneurs. Their motivations
were practically identical, as were their education levels, success factors, and
reasons for starting a business. They had even learned the same lessons from
their past successes and failures.
The only difference was that women placed a higher value than men did on