Michael Arrington on TechCrunch recently wrote a post about his frustration with folks blaming him for the lack of women in technology. I felt the need to respond, since I have many thoughts about this topic. I’m including my response here.

Hi Michael,

[ignoring all the bickery comments and just commenting on your post] I understand why you would be frustrated with people blaming you and other men in your situation for the lack of women in tech when you feel like you’re doing everything you can to encourage them (and it’s probably not just women blaming you, although you say “the next time you women want to start pointing the finger at me…” which seems silly and a bit alienating).

I agree that the problem of “too few women in tech” or “too few women who start companies” is not necessarily based on the end of the line – whether women get hired or paid attention to or written about on TechCrunch – but starts a lot earlier. And it’s not because of genetics.

I’m currently working in the tech field in San Francisco, and I was the only graduating female in my undergrad computer science department (recently, in 2006), which is an old story I know, but what people don’t talk about as much is that there were a lot of women in my intro to computer science courses. In fact, the course was about 40% women. By the end, however, most of the women had dropped out. It wasn’t that women weren’t interested in technology, and it wasn’t that they weren’t “smart enough” – they were getting comparable if not better grades than the male students. It had to be something else.

I was/am clearly interested in this topic, and so for a sociology course I spent a year writing a paper on women in tech, and found variety of “reasons” that might account for these dropout rates. You’re welcome to read it if you like. 🙂 Bottom line – self-confidence is one of the major issues here, even when girls & women perform well, many women just don’t think they’ll cut it, in the tech and the entrepreneurial field. And this lack of confidence is based on the way girls tend to be raised as well as the [lack of] experience they tend to have prior to college.

Banister mentioned risk-taking as one of the reasons women don’t tend to start companies as much, and I would agree with the basic concept, although disagree that it’s not “in their nature.” I agree that girls aren’t encouraged to take risks as much as boys in our culture and many others. For the sociology paper I wrote I cited a paper (written quite awhile ago, but still completely relevant IMO) that measured how far parents let little girls go in playgrounds before calling them back (as opposed to little boys). The distance boys were allowed to go averaged 2,452 yards, while the girls were called back after an average of only 959 yards. This is just a small example that encapsulates many other situations throughout childhood.

Because self-confidence is one of the major issues, encouraging women to start companies by writing somewhat aggressively, like so, “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 (like this one). Let’s have less of the former and more of the latter” is probably not the best way to encourage women to start companies and write to you about them.

Thanks for your post!

- Shawna