Female entrepreneurs still face an uphill battle

Pop quiz, name a tech entrepreneur that you admire.

It’s probably a safe bet that a man came to mind, and some women are trying to encourage more of their peers to launch start-ups.

However, Penelope Trunk argues on TechCrunch that efforts to encourage more women to start tech companies are unnecessary, even misguided. “Women have a choice,” she says. They are “choosing children over startups” and “making decisions for themselves just fine.” But what is choice when it is pre-defined by societal expectations, misogyny and a lack of early opportunities for women to flex their entrepreneurial wings?

Let’s ignore the bit where Trunk attempts to undermine the women calling for more female entrepreneurs by saying that they have no experience of start-ups and thus cannot comment on gender balance issues. And let’s ignore the bit where she makes huge assumptions about what makes women happy. In fact, let’s ignore that whole sweeping generalisation about ‘what women want’, because when we talk about tech entrepreneurs, we’re actually talking about a terribly small minority of people regardless of gender. We’re not talking about all men when we talk of entrepreneurs, let alone all women.

More from News & Analysis

What is the US HIRE Bill and why is India’s $250-billion IT sector worried? Is the internet dead? What's this theory that OpenAI's Sam Altman says might be true?

And let’s also ignore the feminist-shaped straw man about respecting mothers for choosing to stay at home with their kids. Calling for more support for female innovators is not the same as casting aspersions on home makers.

[caption id=“attachment_154592” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Penelope Trunk argues that we shouldn’t try to encourage more women into tech start-ups, because women are already making their own choices and are choosing children over start-ups. Getty Images”]  [/caption]

Instead, let’s just look at that word: Choice. What does it mean when we say that women today have a choice?

When it comes to start-ups, many creative women with good ideas for tech products and services actually don’t have much of a choice about how they explore their ideas. Few women learns how to code when they were kids, even fewer persisted through adolescence to the point where, by their 20s, they have the skills needed to start putting together a tech product.

And when a woman has an idea but not the skills to act upon it, she has to get someone else in, and that person is almost always a man because more men can code than women. Who, then, will be invited to conferences to talk about the product? Who will be given the kudos for developing it? Well, that accolade tends to go to the coder, not the ideas person.

So why don’t more women have the skills to build their own web services? Was that a choice that they consciously made? It would be absurd to think that all the keen young girls who are good at maths and analytical thought simply woke up one day and said to themselves, “No, I shall never wish to start my own business in the tech industry, ergo and therefore I shall not be needing to learn how to code.”

Kids do what’s fun, but even when stuff is fun they will abandon it if they are either not encouraged through difficult patches or if they experience negative peer pressure. There can be no doubt that programming is seen as a boy thing, not a girl thing, and that the peer pressure against being a girl geek is huge. In truth, the number of girls interested in computing just whittles away as they grow older and succumb to the social norm.

[caption id=“attachment_154593” align=“alignright” width=“366” caption=“So why don’t more women have the skills to build their own web services? Getty Images”]  [/caption]

But even if you persist with your boyish pastimes, attitudes towards failure by girls are radically different to failure by boys. As a friend once pointed out to me, when she failed at something in maths she was patted on the head and told, “There, there, at least you tried”, whereas when boys failed at similar tasks, they were told to try again.

The same is true of start-ups. When women fail at a start-up, and here I speak from painful experiences, we are told, “There, there, at least you tried. Now maybe you ought to get a proper job.” Men may get some sympathy too, but the general message - especially in America - is that you’re not an entrepreneur until you’ve failed a few times, so get out there and get back on that horse.

As for choosing to have a family, well, Trunk should try being 40 and child-free for a while because then she might understand more clearly the pressures brought to bear on women to have a family. Society on the whole assumes that all women must be desperate for children and that if you don’t you must in some way be defective, or heartless, or simply “not have found the right man”.

So where’s the choice? Well, yes, it’s there, but you’ve got to dig through 100 feet of crap to find it. All the defaults are against you. It is very hard to fight stereotypes your whole life when there are almost no female role models to look up to and encourage you. And it’s even worse when you look at your future and all you can see is the glass ceiling: men get paid more than women for the equivalent work; men get promoted more than women; women make up only 16 per cent of board-level executives in Fortune-500 companies.

I campaign to raise awareness of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths through Ada Lovelace Day. I’ve heard all of the arguments as to why there’s ’not a problem’ before, but upon closer examination none of them hold water. Pieces like Trunk’s make it so much harder to convince people that we still need to take action. We still need to support women in tech. We still need to combat the subtle misogyny that pervades the tech world.

But there is one thing about Trunk’s piece that gives me hope: Many of the comments are more thoughtful, more empathic, and better informed that Trunk’s own screed. That is, indeed, a step forward.