I’ll be the first to admit that the Unreasonable Institute team is all male. Okay, that’s not much of an admission, but it’s true. We’ve spent a lot of time introspecting as to the reason for that (not about why we’re male, but why there aren’t any females on the team). But even after all that reflecting, we weren’t sure of the reason. All of us on the Unreasonable team went to the University of Colorado in Boulder and three of us were best friends before we started the organization. So the team organically materialized out of our conversations and all of our personal passions. But it incidentally did so without women.
Women involved with the Unreasonable Institute. And now we ask this question because it may have had some effect on the number of women entrepreneurs we can attract to the Unreasonable Institute. Here are a few stats on the matter:
- Of the 284 applications we received for the Unreasonable Institute, 97 (34%) were female
- 16 of 47 of our mentors are female (34%)
- 11 of our 33 finalists are women (33%)
A lot of people I’ve talked to (both women and men) suggest that these numbers are high, arguing there just aren’t as many female entrepreneurs and male entrepreneurs (a contention the data and my personal observation appear to support). But the question is then why aren’t their as many female entrepreneurs as male entrepreneurs? Are women simply less likely to start their own ventures? Are women facing discrimination in areas outside the entrepreneurial space, like in education, that are obstacles to their being entrepreneurs?
The Data on Women Entrepreneurs. Apparently not. Vivek Wadhwa wrote a great post in Tech Crunch entitled “Silicon Valley: You and Some of Your VC’s Have a Gender Problem” highlighting data from a recent Kauffman Foundation study (being release in the spring) on this very subject. He indicates that the study’s analysis of 549 startups concluded the following:
Women entrepreneurs were as highly educated as their male counterparts
, had the same early interest in starting their own business, and learned the same valuable lessons from their work experience and from prior successes and failures. The only real difference was that women put a higher value on their business partners and on their personal and professional networks.
Is it that women are less competent than men? Quite to the contrary. An analysis performed by Cindy Padnos, managing director of Illuminate Ventures, showed that women are more capital-efficient than the norm and that venture-backed companies run by a woman had annual revenues that were 12 percent higher and used an average of one-third less committed capital. Women-led high-tech startups have lower failure rates than those led by men. And organizations that are the most inclusive of women in top management achieve 35% higher return on equity and 34% better total return to shareholders than do their peers.
Considering this information, it would seem that it’s not the quality of women or their drive as entrepreneurs that keeps them from participation in the field, but something else.
What can we do? Especially considering Vivek Wadhwa’s contention that “we’re holding back the most productive half of our population,” what else can we do to encourage the involvement and participation of women entrepreneurs as a space and at the Unreasonable Institute?
