Silicon Valley VCs and the Gender Gap 375
fysdt writes with this excerpt from TechCrunch:
"An analysis of Dunn and Bradstreet data shows that of the 237,843 firms founded in 2004, only 19% had women as primary owners. And only 3% of tech firms and 1% of high-tech firms (as in Silicon Valley) were founded by women. Look at the executive teams of any of the Valley's tech firms — minus a couple of exceptions like Padmasree Warrior of Cisco — you won't find any women CTOs. Look at the management teams of companies like Apple — not even one woman. It's the same with the VC firms — male dominated. You'll find some CFOs and HR heads, but women VCs are a rare commodity in venture capital. And with the recent venture bloodbath, the proportion of women in the VC numbers is declining further. It's no coincidence that only one of the 84 VCs on the 2009 TheFunded list of top VCs was a woman. ... Additionally, it is harder for women to obtain funding than for men. ... historically, women-led companies have received less than 9% of venture capital investments; in 2007, the proportion of funded female CEOs dropped to 3%."
As expected (Score:5, Interesting)
If you believe that sociopaths are more likely to become effective CEOs, as has been claimed, then given that antisocial personality disorder is about 3 times more common among men than women, this is pretty much exactly what you'd expect.
Re:Why should I care? (Score:2, Interesting)
We'll agree there are too many white guys, and it's a good ole boys club.
I'd rather have a CEO that was competent, having watched so many steer a ship into the docks or simply capsize it.
I'd rather have a CTO that had guts (balls, tits, doesn't matter) than one that will simply cave to a PHB because of the mortgage, blah blah blah.
The skills require a lot of talent. The fact that stockholders can't put their fingers around executive management's throats is another problem. People are hunter gatherers and their greedy. The warrors (that's what a lot of execs think of themselves as) are into it for the smell of blood (finaincial hemmoraging, mostly).
Talent? They all need talent. Payton Manning or Steve Jobs. They're worth it. Jobs is much more of a control-freak proctological oriffice than Manning, but they bring home the points and profits. That's what they get paid for. Both might be overrated, but tell that to the stockholders.
Division of labor (Score:4, Interesting)
Most comments seem to be from the outside looking in, looking from the big picture to the small.
Try a different strategy. Look at the small picture and imagine it replicated a zillion times.
So, the wife and I serve the evil empire at our corporate jobs. Due to gender quotas, etc, she's pretty much untouchable at a big enough corporation in her technical field. The only way it could be better for my wife, is if she were a minority. Me, I'm just another off the shelf white male tech dude. Which of us should stay in the corporate world to haul down some cash and (more importantly) health insurance? The replaceable cog in the machine man, or the quota'd fire-proof woman? Obviously the least risky solution is she keeps her day job, he forms the new company.
Multiply by roughly 10000x and you get the reported numbers. No great surprise, really.
Re:Why should I care? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Carli Fiorina (Score:4, Interesting)
Carli Fiorina was such a hugely pathetic failure at HP not because she is a woman, but because she zero engineering expertise (degrees in philosophy, medieval history and business if I'm remembering correctly). Apple found out the same thing when they hired John Scully to be CEO. Total fail. When non-engineers try and run tech companies, there seems to be a *much* higher probability of failure.
Re:Time for.... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm continually surprised whenever a gender related topic comes up for discussion on Slashdot. There is an awful lot of bitterness towards women on this site. Where it comes from, I don't know; but it is present across the tech sector. Considering how liberal slashdotters tend to be on most issues, this one really stands out like a sore thumb.
Men are Riskier (Score:5, Interesting)
Venture capitalists are risktakers. Tech top execs are risktakers. Overall execs are risktakers. Taking risks tends to send people to the extremes of their groups, bigger winners or bigger losers. Men tend to be at the top of professions, but also at the bottom, and in the lowest jobs, and without income at all. Men are much more likely to be injured by their jobs, to have risky jobs, and live shorter lives.
Women tend to take fewer and less extreme risks, and tend to be in the middle of achievement, but more reliably achieve minimum standards of living.
Biologically men are more expendable. Aggression gets more rewards, but it also takes more damage. The limiting factor on human population growth is the number of women, while even one man can produce an entire generation among all the women.
There are social conventions held over from less developed societies that work to hold women back. And the bias towards training men to take risks and be expendable is an unfair gender bias now that the biological value isn't what determines social value.
So long as risktaking is so different between men and women, rewardtaking is going to be similarly different. We could get closer to our inherent value regardless of gender's arbitrary constraints if we stopped ignoring the gender behavior that we are free to change, but don't, that affects success. And if we stopped ignoring the costs to either gender that come with either the achievement or the risktaking that underlies it.
Re:Why should I care? (Score:3, Interesting)
As lame as this sounds, equality at home from birth produces equality everywhere.
Childless, eh? My mom grew up in a log cabin, got the hell out of the poverty, went to college, and ended up being responsible for the communications network of a major railroad. My wife's a surgeon. My sisters have positions of responsibility in their fields. Frankly, the idea of women as somehow inferior is just foreign to me.
I have two daughters. One plays softball on a year-round team, spends her free time drawing and animating cartoons with Scratch [mit.edu] (without me suggesting it - I just showed it to her one day and she took it from there), asked for and got a remote control helicopter for Christmas, and wants to be a biologist or an astronaut.
The other loves strawberries and picks only pink clothes, asks for and gets Littlest Pet Shops and Polly Pockets for birthday and Christmas, wants to be a puppy [flickr.com], and is the stereotype of a little drama queen to her mom's chagrin.
Two kids. Same environment. Same opportunities. One is science oriented, and the other seems tracked for fashion design. I think nature has a lot more influence than you're giving it credit for.
Re:Why should I care? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that I'd have a double standard based on gender. If my son isn't programming by the age of 10, I'll disown him, too. To paraphrase Mel Brooks, it's good to be the daddy.
In fact, as I sit here typing this, I'm eying my nine-year-old dog and thinking, "You know, he hasn't produced any useful code lately..."
Re:Division of labor (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's see: Females being elevated and at the same time protected by a large number of disposable males? Sounds like a recurring pattern in nature.
Re:America is already screwed up (Score:3, Interesting)
How so, exactly? You will note that I do NOT advocate that women should be kept barefoot and pregnant, and kept out of any field of work. I am arguing against some vapid revolutionary concept that the world should be forced to push women into a field that many women find uninteresting.
Go ahead - read all those previous posts again. The basic premise is, there are few women who own or manage a particular type of company. There are few women in senior positions in the field. Hence, something is wrong with society, and we should mandate changes.
I say, "Why?" Are there large numbers of women who WANT into these positions and fields? Are women intentionally being shut out?
Let's see some evidence. I don't mean anecdotes by one or six activists, some or all of whom may simply be incompetent. Let's see some statistics regarding the women who have struggled and worked to get into the field, and were unfairly shot down by callus fools who are members of the Good Old Boys club.
I also argue against government quotas and subsidies aimed at fixing what I see as a nonexistent problem. You want quotas and/or subsidies? Prove that there is a problem. Show me that women are being discriminated against, and you'll get my vote.
Meanwhile - how many ethnic Persians own corporations in Silicon Valley? How many ethnic Kurds? How many Jews? Should we mandate that every group in the world who might conceivably claim some sort of prejudice be subsidized, as well?
Re:Why should I care? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you think that these ridiculously high paying jobs require no skills and nothing other than a buddy from the tennis club downtown, then why aren't you doing that?
Speaking for myself: because I have no desire to. The hours suck, the non-skills are schmoozing and making small-talk with small-minded ignoramuses, and while the financial rewards are considerable the lifestyle is hollow and dull.
I ran my own company for quite a few years, and saw very clearly from my clients and partner companies that on average the higher up the food chain you went the less it mattered what you know and the more it mattered who you know. If "knowing the right people" and "fitting in with an unbelievably dull and ignorant social set" can be considered skills then I'll grant you these jobs require skill: the skills of a self-interested political manipulator, perhaps.
But the fact remains that in my current position I could do everything the company president does (I know this because I was the president of my own company and have worked in senior management at companies larger than my current employer) while he could not do a single aspect of my job.
Ergo, the GP's point is correct: CXO jobs require little to no actual skill, as the term is generally used. Or rather, to do them well does require skill and talent, but the majority of the occupants of these positions today are unskilled and talentless, which explains the dismal state of America's once-great corporations.