Girls on top: Why society needs more women in tech

Why are there not more women ruling the roost in Silicone Valley? In our new series Girls on Top we explore the women making waves in the tech industry - starting with founder of The Dots Pip Jamieson's open letter on why society needs more women in tech on top.

“I was at an event recently, and met a senior cabinet minister. This happened right after I’d raised a £4m investment round, to scale my business The Dots: a creator’s antithesis to LinkedIn. We were discussing how only 9% of funding into UK startups goes to women-run businesses. At my level, though, only 2.2% of Venture Capital (‘VC’) investment goes to female founders and if you look at investment into female Black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) founders, the numbers are so woeful they aren’t even measured!

The minister’s first response – formed in consultation with senior tech leaders & VCs – took me aback: “It’s a pipeline issue” he said, and we’re addressing this via STEM (‘Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics’) education in schools”. Yes, female STEM pipeline is a challenge for tech companies wanting to build gender diverse engineering teams, but when it comes to backing female tech founders, this excuse is a complete cop-out and vastly over-simplifies a far more complex problem (but hey I guess that’s what politicians do – need I mention BREXIT!).

Simply saying ‘pipeline’ implies that we can pass the buck to the next generation; because until those newly educated female STEM grads grow up and become Founders, there’s nothing we can really do. The inequality is entrenched.

Let’s go back to basics – why is it important that we back more female tech founders? First, it makes solid business sense. For example, First Round Capital (early investors in Uber) found that companies with a female founder performed 63% better than its investments with all-male founding teams. A study by Dow Jones of 20,000 US VC-backed start-ups found that a company’s probability of success rises with the proportion of women in executive management positions.

Second, female run businesses are more likely to build diverse teams and there is now endless research that shows diverse teams are better for innovation. A London Business School study found that more gender-balanced teams are found to best promote environments where innovation can flourish. A Harvard Business School study found that teams that include workers from different backgrounds and experiences are also found to come up with more creative ideas and methods of solving problems. The list of examples is endless.

Third, diverse team also build better products. Only 17% of employees in the UK tech sector are women, which means we are unconsciously building tech solutions for men, not everyone.  Take the act of searching websites for example. On average men prefer to search a site using free text search. While women are more likely prefer some form of signposting (like a ‘drop down’ search menu). The challenge comes when a product is built by a primarily male team, what happens is they unconsciously build products for themselves – not for everyone.I’m as guilty of bias as the next person, it’s human nature. Small changes like this add up – it’s no coincidence that LinkedIn’s members are primarily male, while The Dots membership is 62% female – I am after all a female founder and LinkedIn’s founder Reed Hoffman is a man. Granted I got a bit of shit for this female overrepresentation on Twitter recently (“That’s not diverse!”), but I think it’s important that female founders start influencing ideas to surface new perspectives.

But most importantly, we need more female tech founders as we’re more likely to build products that are socially responsible – not just highly addictive products that drive advertising revenue. And as we enter a more complex tech world, isn’t it more important that we build solutions that benefit people and society more broadly?

So if we need more female tech founders, what can we do about this beyond simply waiting for female STEM grads to enter the workforce?

First and foremost, the government needs to stop obsessing about STEM. I think ‘STEAM’ is more important i.e putting the ‘Arts’ (i.e creativity) at the heart of tech solutions. As automation replaces non-creative routine jobs, we need  more people to come up with creative tech solutions. The government needs to invest more in creative education – Ken Robinson is right ‘’Creativity is as important as literacy’”. Also tech companies need to hire more creatives – it’s when you put an engineer next to a creative that the magic really happens.

You also don’t need an engineering degree to be a tech founder – I’m living proof of that. Many forward thinking VCs (like Atomico, one of the largest funds in the UK) no longer require tech founders to have a tech background. What’s more important is that they can build and lead a world class team. More investors need to follow suit.

As with most complex issues, there is no silver bullet. The myriad of challenges that face ambitious women equally translate to ambitious tech Founders like access to child care, shared parenting responsibility, imposter syndrome, overcoming unconscious bias and sometimes overt discrimination.

But being an optimist I have hope for the future! A recent YouGov survey found that 1 in 10 women in the UK want to start their own business, so there is a tidal wave of women on the horizon. If you’re an incredible man reading this who craves for a better world then please back these women, invest in them, work for them, support them at home and help lift them up! And if you’re a woman contemplating becoming a tech Founder, my advice is ‘just do it’ – because if I can, you can too!

And finally if you’re a politician, please don’t just say tech founder diversity is a ‘pipeline’ issue, you’re not helping matters. Actually,  by kicking the can down the road you’re making things worse.”

Pip Jamieson is the founder of The Dots

photography
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