Too Few Women in Tech? Stop Telling People How They Should Feel About It.

Michael Arrington ignited a firestorm last week when he posted an article to TechCrunch titled “Too Few Women in Tech? Don’t Blame the Men.”

“The problem isn’t that Silicon Valley is keeping women down, or not doing enough to encourage female entrepreneurs,” wrote Arrington. “The opposite is true. No, the problem is that not enough women want to become entrepreneurs.”

Arrington singled out New York media critic Rachel Sklar – who’d pointed the finger at TechCrunch in a quote for a recent Wall Street Journal article – and said that “ there are women like Sklar who complain about how there are too few women in tech, and then there are women just who go out and start companies.”

Sklar responded to Arrington via Twitter: “ Thanks for making this a topic 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 older and a bit more experienced, I’ve more clearly seen the need for this conversation, and I’ve come to appreciate it. Men have thousands of business role models to choose from – not just in the Internet age, but in the past several thousand years of history -- thousands of career paths and personalities to pore over and pick and choose from, to get some sense, some little glimmer, of how this is supposed to be done. Of how people like me can do this. 

For women, especially in tech, that pool is vastly smaller. In many other previously male-dominated fields – medicine, entertainment, journalism -- young women today have as many same-sex role models as the men. In tech, we still don’t. When I encounter a woman I find relatable succeeding in tech, I hunt her down and I interrogate her. I’m desperate for examples of how to do this, how to carve out a path for myself in this world as myself, not as some chick 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 in discussing the obstacles and the solutions, and there’s value in actively supporting 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 in all facets of the Seattle tech world. I asked them why they thought there were so 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, speak out, and look out after themselves and their careers - in many of the same ways men do,” says Monica Harrington, CMO at Intersect. “And men need to be more self-aware about when they're creating a culture that favors men unfairly.”

Harrington referenced her days at Microsoft, when her male colleagues played basketball early in the morning with the senior execs. “They’d start meetings with those same execs by recounting glory moments from those early morning sessions,” she says. “The overt bonding display put me and other women at a disadvantage. When I called out a very senior exec on that issue, he told 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. ”

Sharon Bjeletich, 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 do training for the upper management where a man came into a meeting room full of women, who were all talking about sewing and cooking, or something traditionally female. When the man talked, they would ignore him and then continue their conversation. They would very quickly and empirically understand why women tend to be quiet in meetings. You are always more timid when you are the minority and there is no effort made to include you.”

Peter Chee, founder of Thinkspace, says that “if a woman wants to be an entrepreneur, then go be one. I don’t go out seeking men who are entrepreneurs, I go out and seek other successful entrepreneurs regardless of gender.”

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 guy wants it, men are more likely to leave and join another company or start his own thing. If things aren't working out the way a women wants it, she'll stick around and work to fix it … I don’t think men are the solution here. We have a very specific way of approaching startups, and it’s wrong to assume women should approach startups the same way.”

Dave Schappell, founder of TeachStreet, echoes a lot of the opinions I heard on the reason we don’t have more 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 more uteri in tech, grab your nearest 3-year-old girl and make damn sure she’s around computers all the time.”

Martin adds that “most women who consider themselves ‘in tech’ can’t Hello World themselves out of a paper bag. If they can’t motivate themselves to crack an O’Reilly book, how can anyone consider them role models?”

This response was interesting, I thought, when juxtaposed with the response I got from Nancy Xiao, a recent high-school grad and TeachStreet intern. “I’ve come to realize one of my bigger challenges is not having a technical background,” she says. “Just because a woman doesn’t speak Ruby doesn’t mean she’s incapable.”

Are we subtly discouraging women from working in tech because they don’t have technical backgrounds? Is Martin’s outspoken disavowal of the non-coder folks in tech industries evidence of a quieter and more pervasive discrimination?

Hillel Cooperman, co-founder of Jackson Fish Market, sent what was to me the most powerful of all the responses I read. (He sent it after first referring my question set to his female co-founder – I wrote back that I wanted to hear male opinions as well.)

“The single most important thing you can do to increase the number of women in leadership roles in tech is to put women in those positions,” he said. “Doing is all that matters. Women in leadership positions beget additional women in leadership positions. They serve as role models for women, and more importantly for the broader organization and its partners.”