Damn, Girl: New York Has Almost Double The Female Founders

[kristianc]

I wonder how much of tech's "gender divide" has to do with the way women in tech are reported?

Take this article for example - it references the Akon song "Sexy Bitch" in the title (yeah, real female empowerment there!), it doesn't mention a single female startup or founder, and the picture is a generic Flickr grab of a woman walking past a coffee shop in a short skirt.

All of it, even the fact that the section is called "Ladybeat" serves to further this principle that there is a "Women's" tech ecosystem and it is somehow different from the male one. I mean "female-friendly fashion and beauty startups?" Come on.

[unreal37]

I think you're trying to find a conspiracy where there is none.

The lack of women in tech (and lack of women in science and math in general) starts at a very young age - while boys are immersed in video games and girls are having afternoon tea with their dolls. I doubt those 5-year-olds are influenced by the way women in tech are reported.

Maybe society in general assigns gender roles that we all feel forced to comply with. Or maybe we're just different. Can't men and women just be a bit different?

[untog]

A quick google returns songs called "Damn Girl" by Justin Timberlake, All American Rejects... I think it's safe to say that it's just a well known phrase, not a reference to a song called "Sexy Bitch".

[kami8845]

>it references the Akon song "Sexy Bitch"

No, it doesn't. Stop making up conspiracy theories where there are none.

[granfalloon]

i agree with your main point, but saying that the title is a reference to Akon is a bit silly

[Tossrock]

Completely unimportant quibble: That song is actually by David Guetta, and /features/ Akon.

[m_ke]

It has everything to do with NYC being more than a tech hub. It's arguably the fashion and business capital of the world and the startups that we get here tend to reflect that. Having people from all backgrounds building businesses around real problems in their industries sets it apart from SV, where you get people doing startups for the sake of startups.

[peterb]

I agree with your general argument about NYC. SV isn't only where you get "people doing startups for the sake of startups" (although it has that). It is more technology focused and less "all business" like NYC.

[aristidb]

New York never ceases to amaze! Almost half of founders are women... I'm sure that can only be a good thing for the diversity of problems solved, and those startups' availability to address wider audiences. Obviously Silicon Valley needs to learn from NYC.

[Cushman]

I wonder what this might have to do with it:

  > Local entrepreneurs are 4.3 times as likely to list 
  > “content” as their competitive advantage.

The Valley is very focused on tech; if we grant that tech as a subculture is overwhelmingly male, it would make sense to see a higher ratio of women in startups (and thus in areas) which are less tech-centric.

[kscaldef]

I figured this was likely to explain almost all of it:

    Founding Team Composition: Silicon Valley founding teams are 34% more likely to be technical heavy than founding teams from NYC. Whereas NYC founding teams are almost 2x as likely to be business heavy than Silicon Valley founding teams.

[discolemonade]

The answer to why there are more female founders in New York than the Valley is easy: Valley startups tend to be a lot more tech-heavy than NYC startups as a whole. And women in general aren't drawn to deep technology. I find it interesting how whenever issues of women and technology come up, everyone gets all pc and pretends not to know what the root of the gender gap is. But then if you ask them to count the number of women they know who are fascinated by technology, mathematics and deep, impersonal abstraction, they can't. Human nature doesn't change just because we pump a few billion dollars into figuring out how to get girls to love STEM. It'll never change. Tech heavy centers like Silicon Valley will always have a preponderence of male entrepreneurs and less tech heavy centers like NYC will always be more appealing to female entrepreneurs. Boys will be boys and girls will be girls.

[nicholasjbs]

Human nature doesn't change just because we pump a few billion dollars into figuring out how to get girls to love STEM. It'll never change.

If women's interest in CS is purely fixed by human nature, how do you account for the precipitous drop over the past decades? Women got 37% of the CS degrees in 1984 but get way fewer now.[1]

[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~women/resources/aroundTheWeb/hostedPa...

[marquis]

As a woman in a technical field who is fascinated by 'deep' technology, and mentors other girls to foster their own interests towards a technical career, your comment serves to isolate and offend. Please keep divisive gender-based comments out of this forum unless you have some very hard data to back this up.

[hack_edu]

All these statements about human nature, the gender gap, and the motivation for 'tinkering late at night' are quite baseless.

Go on, you have a lot of ground to cover before you're going to convince anyone that this is more than just another angry pre-coffee rant.

[Duff]

Other highly technical areas, such as medicine, don't seem to have this problem. The average doctor has a better handle on science and mathematics that the most computer professionals ever had.

[lolilives]

I can't figure out if this guy is trolling or not.

[vectorpush]

count the number of women they know who are fascinated by technology, mathematics and deep, impersonal abstraction

Classic nature vs nurture debate. You have no evidence to support the claim that women are inherently less inclined towards tech (instead of say, conditioned by society to be tech averse).

[woodall]

Bio-truths on HN. Why is this not suprising in the least?

[jgrahamc]

There's also a demographic difference between New York and Silicon Valley. Some figures from the 2010 census:

   New York City, Female persons: 52.5%

   San Francisco County, Female persons: 49.3%
   San Mateo County, Female persons: 50.8%	
   Santa Clara County, Female persons: 49.8%

[Groxx]

I wonder if even a small imbalance could almost completely explain it.

If a gender is less likely to be able to find a Significant Other (we'll assume that homosexuality exists in equal proportions in both genders), would they be more likely to take risks than the other gender? It wouldn't take much of a difference to make a large change in founder figures, since such a small amount of people try to start a company.

[CoffeeAndCoffee]

New York City is one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world, and I'll bet that the diversity in New York is evident in New York's tech scene.

[Jun8]

Exactly. I remember reading dating scene analyses that report the ratio of 2:1 for men and women around SF whereas in NYC it is just the reverse. This neatly explains the x2 factor.

[sycr]

I'd be curious to know the kinds of industries female founders in NYC gravitate towards - or if there isn't a clear cluster at all, and it's a fairly even distribution. If it's the latter, what does New York have that other cities don't?

[rmah]

One of the biggest that I know of is Gilt Groupe, founded by Michael Bryzek and Alexandria Wilkis Wilson. Many of the execs are also female. They're doing quite well, with revenues of apx $500mil in 2011. They do flash sales of apparel and the like.

[hugs]

I noticed this last Fall at the Open Hardware Summit in NYC. That event has become the must-attend event for those involved in open source hardware. (Arduino team members, et al.) The event was founded and chaired by Alicia Gibb and Ayah Bdeir. And the speaker list was way more gender-balanced than your typical SF/SV event. No one was asking "where are the women?" at OHSummit. (But if they did ask, the answer was: "Everywhere! And they're leading the charge!")

[vishaldpatel]

New York also has a little more than double the females.

[iamgilesbowkett]

I'm glad to hear this. The sexism in SF/SV is one of the major reasons I moved away.

[nirvana]

I think NY and SV differ culturally and thus differ in the mix of startups that take root there (hence the %400 higher likelihood of listing "content", for instance.)

This may mean that women are more likely to pick areas for doing a startup that are consistent with the NY startup culture than the SV startup culture.

On the other hand, I can imagine that many startups in NY are funded by well heeled individuals (many of whom are women) in a sort of friends-and-family fashion that is more casual than the VC & Angel style of SV. This is purely speculation, but given my interactions with venture capitalists, I think their thinking and focus is more... conservative and traditional.... and that this may well mean women led companies are less likely to find funding in SV than the same company in NY.

If this perspective is correct, then we may find that with startup crowdsourcing, an even higher percentage of women will get funded than in SV.

[Radzell]

I agree silicon valley from what I have seen since trying to get into startups NY seems to be the more professional of the two more suit and button ups. Silicon valley is more technical geek and their startups seem to be more based technical performance. I personally being technical don't really like the NY mode but I can see why people like it.