How Female Entrepreneurs Can Take Advantage of The Gender Imbalance or Get a Date

Entrepreneurs | November 18th, 2009 | Comment (1)

Two weeks ago I was down in San Francisco attending the PayPal X Innovate conference. It was a fantastic launch platform for our FundRazr product and we couldn’t have asked for better press, momentum and exposure. If you were in the market for meeting a man it also would have been a smart move to be there with the ratio of men to women at about 98:1.

(CC) PayPal X Innovate 2009

This is often the case in the technology sector and not for the reasons I initially thought. My own observations were that men are `wired’ to analytical problem solving and so roles like a developer or programmer suit their very nature.

It appears that’s not the case at all. The positive trend is that it’s beginning to change with more women entering this sector and more men welcoming them. I intend to be part of this change.

How? Well by being a role model of the modern day woman in tech. I decided to relish my unique position as a female CoFounder in this male dominated environment. Whilst I wouldn’t label myself a tech expert -yet, I knew that I needed to know the answers for the serious tech questions I’d be hit with when conducting demo after demo of our application.

And I believe I conquered. Where I didn’t know the answer I’d provide a suitable stand in one until I’d clarified it with our developers! I’ve learned if you deliver your message with confidence and authority people will take you at your word.

I also knew that it would be an advantage to be one of the only women in the kiosk area wearing a dress and high-heels. Knowing the West Coast tech scene would be in jeans and sneakers, I decided to stand out from the crowd, because I could, because I wanted to and because it would draw more people to our kiosk. It worked. In fact I just found this video from a great lady who had been trying to get an interview at our busy kiosk.

Brains combined with femininity can be a killer combo. In a previous post on Cracking the Boys Club Code, one reader commented on wanting to know how to combine our female `assets’ with business. My answer is you just need to be your true authentic self and know where your strengths lie. For me that’s engaging with people, networking, brainstorming, innovating and thinking about the big picture.

What I enjoyed more was watching the reaction on people’s faces, that I’d walked through a demo, take my business card and see that I’m a CoFounder. It seemed that they had a whole new level of respect for me.

Even better was the number of energizing conversations with women in the media or in the tech business who came by to chat, and were all for promoting women in the industry. Post conference I met up with one of these very women, Baat Enosh from Women 2.0 – a fantastic organization that is committed to increasing the number of female entrepreneurs starting high growth ventures.

She blew me away by telling me that loads of research has been done to challenge my former thinking on how we’re wired. Society dominated by men has shaped us to believe that women and men are meant for different types of roles. But this isn’t true at all, it’s a product of the teachings we receive from childhood.

So instead of looking at the end result, you could try looking at what shapes us from a young age. Whether it’s the image society imprints on a “computer-geek” to taking a closer look at the books we learn from and the systems in place which are often tailored to how boys would best learn the likes of mathematics, not how girls necessarily would.

Baat told me that for instance, in Malaysia 2/3 of computer science students are women.Computer Science is not perceived as masculine in that country, in addition to having the government acknowledge that as a job it provides women with flexibility to work from home if they have children, and the nature of the work being project based means interruptions are less of a problem. You can read about it here

This fascinates me, just how much we take for granted yet how much we can change, for the better by understanding that there really are no limits, only those society places upon us, or worse yet, we place upon ourselves. More to come.

Also check out Why the time of women in technology is now