Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By Sasha Pasulka
Michael Arrington ignited a firestorm last week when heposted an article to TechCrunch titled “Too Few Women in Tech? Don’t Blame theMen.”
“The problem isn’t that SiliconValley is keeping women down, or not doing enough to encourage femaleentrepreneurs,” wrote Arrington. “The opposite is true. No, the problem is thatnot enough women want to become entrepreneurs.”
Arrington singledout New York media critic Rachel Sklar – who’d pointed the finger at TechCrunchin a quote for a recent Wall Street Journal article – and said that “ there are women like Sklar who complain about how thereare too few women in tech, and then there are women just who go out and startcompanies.”
Sklar responded to Arringtonvia Twitter: “ Thanks for making this atopic of conversation.”
It’s not a new topic of conversation, but Arrington’s rant lent legitimacy to a broadly held perspective on it that’s been stifled in a journalistic climate of forever political correctness. So now we can have a conversation.
As I’ve gotten olderand a bit more experienced, I’ve more clearly seen the need for thisconversation, and I’ve come to appreciate it. Men have thousands of businessrole models to choose from – not just in the Internet age, but in the pastseveral thousand years of history — thousands of career paths andpersonalities to pore over and pick and choose from, to get some sense, somelittle glimmer, of how this is supposedto be done. Of how people like mecan do this.
For women,especially in tech, that pool is vastly smaller. In many other previouslymale-dominated fields – medicine, entertainment, journalism — young women today have as many same-sexrole models as the men. In tech, we still don’t. When I encounter a woman Ifind relatable succeeding in tech, I hunt her down and I interrogate her. I’mdesperate for examples of how to do this, how to carve out a path for myself inthis world as myself, not as somechick trying to masquerade as “one of the boys.”
And I guess that’s why I’m not really Camp Arrington anymore. Today, I know there’s value in creating awareness around the issue; there’s value indiscussing the obstacles and the solutions, and there’s value in activelysupporting and connecting women in this space, in fighting to create those role models and then to create visibility around them. I know because now I need that and I can’t find enough of it. I no longer see it as whining but as action toward an important goal. I see that there is power in that.
This issue is a lot bigger than I am, so I reached out to both men and women inall facets of the Seattle tech world. I asked them why they thought there wereso few women in tech and whose responsibility it was to change this. I asked them about their personal experiences with the gender divide in tech.
“Women need to step forward, speakout, and look out after themselves and their careers – in many of the same waysmen do,” says Monica Harrington, CMO at Intersect. “And men need to be more self-awareabout when they’re creating a culture that favors men unfairly.”
Harrington referenced her days at Microsoft, when her malecolleagues played basketball early in the morning with the senior execs. “They’dstart meetings with those same execs by recounting glory moments from thoseearly morning sessions,” she says. “The overt bonding display put me and otherwomen at a disadvantage. When I called out a very senior exec on that issue, hetold me he thought I was making something out of nothing. He was a smart guy,but when it came to developing and supporting strong women, he was an idiot. ”
SharonBjeletich, a former Program Manager at Microsoft, brought up a similar issue.
“When I worked at Microsoft,people would say that women were too timid in meetings. I always wanted to dotraining for the upper management where a man came into a meeting room full ofwomen, who were all talking about sewing and cooking, or somethingtraditionally female. When the man talked, they would ignore him and then continuetheir conversation. They would very quickly and empirically understand whywomen tend to be quiet in meetings. You are always more timid when you are theminority and there is no effort made to include you.”
Peter Chee, founder of Thinkspace, says that “if a womanwants to be an entrepreneur, then go be one. I don’t go out seeking men who areentrepreneurs, I go out and seek other successful entrepreneurs regardless ofgender.”
But are women at a natural disadvantage as entrepreneurs?Tac Anderson, VP of Digital Strategies at Waggener Edstrom, says that“generally speaking, men are naturally more aggressive risk-takers than women. If things aren’t working out at a big company the way a guywants it, men are more likely to leave and join another company or start hisown thing. If things aren’t working out the way a women wants it, she’ll stickaround and work to fix it … I don’t think men are the solution here. We have avery specific way of approaching startups, and it’s wrong to assume womenshould approach startups the same way.”
Dave Schappell, founder ofTeachStreet, echoes a lot of the opinions I heard on the reason we don’t havemore women as founders. “It’s a case of starter pools,” he says.
Marina Martin, a business consultant, agrees with Schappell. “If you really want to see moreuteri in tech, grab your nearest 3-year-old girl and make damn sure she’saround computers all the time.”
Martin adds that “most women who consider themselves ‘intech’ can’t Hello World themselves out of a paper bag. If they can’t motivatethemselves to crack an O’Reilly book, how can anyone consider them role models?”
This response was interesting, I thought, when juxtaposedwith the response I got from Nancy Xiao, a recent high-school grad andTeachStreet intern. “I’ve come to realize one of my bigger challenges is nothaving a technical background,” she says. “Just because a woman doesn’t speakRuby doesn’t mean she’s incapable.”
Are we subtly discouraging women from working in techbecause they don’t have technical backgrounds? Is Martin’s outspoken disavowalof the non-coder folks in tech industries evidence of a quieter and morepervasive discrimination?
Hillel Cooperman, co-founder of Jackson Fish Market, sentwhat was to me the most powerful of all the responses I read. (He sent it afterfirst referring my question set to his female co-founder – I wrote back that Iwanted to hear male opinions as well.)
“The single most important thing you can do to increase thenumber of women in leadership roles in tech is to put women in thosepositions,” he said. “Doing is allthat matters. Women in leadership positions beget additional women inleadership positions. They serve as role models for women, and more importantlyfor the broader organization and its partners.”
