Thursday, September 2, 2010

Why Women Entrepreneurs Get Funded Less

I just wanted to share some really interesting findings from the Clayman Institute for Gender Research out of Stanford about why women entrepreneurs have a tougher time getting funded than their male counterparts.

Basically, they found that:

1) Social capital and network ties were even more important to women than men : Many successful women entrepreneurs have strong ties to a man that gives them legitimacy as opposed to successful men that tend to have larger, but weaker network ties. There was also some discussion on this panel I saw recently at an Astia conference that women tend to have 2 different networks -- one social, one professional -- while men tend to integrate their social and professional networks much more easily.

2) If a woman has a technical degree then that levels the playing field: Women technicians have a much easier time getting their ventures funded. But clearly there is work to do in order to build a pipeline of technical women leaders. Sep and I are still working away to do our part through CodeEd. Looks like we'll be expanding into two more schools/program NYC and also found two great teachers to start teaching a program in San Francisco in the spring.