Allyson Kapin at Fast Company explores the gender discrepancy in VC startups in Startups: An “Alpha Male Pissing Contest?”.
“Women entrepreneurs do fear failure and they believe they have to do a…to z and prove themselves before they start their own company. Men don’t have that trait, said Amra Tareen, CEO of AllVoices.com and former Partner at the VC firm Seven Rosen Funds. “Men promote themselves even if they cannot do it…they may think they know it all but THEY DON’T. Women on the other hand may have the skills but they will not promote them, and will always feel they need more skills.”
This reiterates something that Restructure! brought up a couple of months ago:
In other industries—and if uttered by someone without a university education—people would call it “sexism”, “racism”, and“ageism”, but not in the technology venture-capital industry. Doerr sees a racial, gender, age “pattern” in which startups are successful, but such “pattern recognition” is misleading when startups led by women, racial minorities, and people over thirty may be unsuccessful because they are discriminated against and denied funding. The pattern may be systemic bias, instead of the inherent superiority of white men (under thirty).
I know it can be a professional risk to talk openly about these things, so I won’t dig too deeply into a lot of the Why and How about it. That’s beyond the scope of this blog. And yet, I do think it’s worthwhile to consider, purely from a marketing standpoint, how your practices reflect your values. If you’ve been paying attention to the trends, authenticity is hot.
Politics aside, these things matter because integrity matters.
If you say you value diversity but people don’t see it, br>you look dishonest and/or ignorant.
Seriously, does it need to be said that anybody can say anything? If diversity, inclusion, equality, and so on and so forth are part of your core values, you’d better be ready to show us where it matters – and I don’t mean just in your ads or your marketing collateral. It’s not for me to say whether diversity should or shouldn’t be part of your brand, or even how to go about making that happen.
But -
If you’re going to talk about it, you need to be about it.
If you’re not going to do that, why bother saying anything at all?
