13 ms·

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

88 points by rmah 15y ago

sycr 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
  - dpritchett 15y ago
    Ms. Wilson's pedigree includes Phillips Exeter, Harvard (twice!), Merrill Lynch, and Louis Vuitton. That list says a lot about the NYC ecosystem. How many people with her background are going to make their way to SV to try a pure-tech play? [1] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/alexandra-wilkis-wilson/0/17b/849 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/alexandra-wilkis-wilson/0/17b/84...
nirvana 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
  - Drbble 15y ago
    Please don't confuse "professional" with fancy taste or cold-weather clothing,
kristianc 15y ago
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.
- granfalloon 15y ago
  i agree with your main point, but saying that the title is a reference to Akon is a bit silly
- unreal37 15y ago
  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?
  - kristianc 15y ago
    Although boys have outperformed girls in exams in maths at 16 here in the UK for the last three years, girls had outperformed boys at maths for the decade before that. You're not arguing that men and women are "just a bit different" so much as you're arguing that people should conform to gender roles which don't necessarily apply. What about gay people in tech - Peter Thiel, Tim Cook, Ben Ling? Shouldn't they have been playing with Barbie dolls, or My Little Pony or whatever at a young age too?
    - burke 15y ago
      I think the takeaway here is that: yes, there is quite likely a societally-imposed suggestion that men should go into software and women should not; however, that it's not just Silicon Valley's fault, and that the genders are really groomed essentially from birth for what they're "supposed to" do.
discolemonade 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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/hostedPapers/Syllabus-Camp.pdf http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~women/resources/aroundTheWeb/hostedPa...
  - discolemonade 15y ago
    To understand what really motivates people, it's much better to look at what they do in the real world. Sure, there have always been women getting CS degrees, but how many of them go out and become programmers or tinker with technology, electronics and hardware late at night because they want to? The people who do that have been the engines behind technological advancement and growth throughout human history. And they've been mostly males. Saying that men tend to be more interested in technology than women doesn't mean that women's interest in CS is purely fixed. It just means that there will always be statistically more males tinkering with technology than females. And those statistical disparities will always ensure that the majority of tech-heavy, companies, and inventions will be led by men.
m_ke 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
  - m_ke 15y ago
    Of course not, but it's Disneyland for engineers and you don't get people from other professions flocking to work there. My girlfriend is a med student and she wasn't a fan of a suggested move to the Valley. My friends in finance dream of Wall Street, those in arts wouldn't trade Broadway for anything and all the fashionistas only hold Paris above 5th ave and SOHO.
jgrahamc 15y ago
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%
- Jun8 15y ago
  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.
  - T-hawk 15y ago
    A female population of 52.5% explains the effect for dating, but not for founding companies. The difference is because it's the surplus that matters for dating but the entire population for founding. Suppose that 42.5% of the population are women in a marriage or committed relationship, and then by definition 42.5% are also committed men. That leaves 10% of the population as single females and 5% as single males, and there's your 2:1 ratio for dating, created by just the small female surplus. Would that hold for founding companies? I don't think so. Any of the 52.5% females could start a business, as could any of the 47.5% males. The small excess of women doesn't create a 2:1 ratio here. (There may be some correlation, that married and settled women are less likely to start a business, but the population ratio can't explain the entire outcome.)
    - Duff 15y ago
      I don't know if the startup founder demographic is well defined enough to make a definitive statement. There are probably significant demographic divisions (race, educational background, housing rent/own ratio, size of industry clusters, national origin, income distribution, etc) that probably have an impact.
  - woohoo 15y ago
    The data above doesn't support that - there's only about a 2% difference.
aristidb 15y ago
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.
iamgilesbowkett 15y ago
I'm glad to hear this. The sexism in SF/SV is one of the major reasons I moved away.
hugs 15y ago
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!")
Cushman 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
vishaldpatel 15y ago
New York also has a little more than double the females.

88 points by rmah 15y ago

sycr 15y ago

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 15y ago
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.
- dpritchett 15y ago
  Ms. Wilson's pedigree includes Phillips Exeter, Harvard (twice!), Merrill Lynch, and Louis Vuitton. That list says a lot about the NYC ecosystem. How many people with her background are going to make their way to SV to try a pure-tech play? [1] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/alexandra-wilkis-wilson/0/17b/849 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/alexandra-wilkis-wilson/0/17b/84...

nirvana 15y ago

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 15y ago
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.
- Drbble 15y ago
  Please don't confuse "professional" with fancy taste or cold-weather clothing,

kristianc 15y ago

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.

granfalloon 15y ago
i agree with your main point, but saying that the title is a reference to Akon is a bit silly
unreal37 15y ago
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?
- kristianc 15y ago
  Although boys have outperformed girls in exams in maths at 16 here in the UK for the last three years, girls had outperformed boys at maths for the decade before that. You're not arguing that men and women are "just a bit different" so much as you're arguing that people should conform to gender roles which don't necessarily apply. What about gay people in tech - Peter Thiel, Tim Cook, Ben Ling? Shouldn't they have been playing with Barbie dolls, or My Little Pony or whatever at a young age too?
  - burke 15y ago
    I think the takeaway here is that: yes, there is quite likely a societally-imposed suggestion that men should go into software and women should not; however, that it's not just Silicon Valley's fault, and that the genders are really groomed essentially from birth for what they're "supposed to" do.

discolemonade 15y ago

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 15y ago
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/hostedPapers/Syllabus-Camp.pdf http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~women/resources/aroundTheWeb/hostedPa...
- discolemonade 15y ago
  To understand what really motivates people, it's much better to look at what they do in the real world. Sure, there have always been women getting CS degrees, but how many of them go out and become programmers or tinker with technology, electronics and hardware late at night because they want to? The people who do that have been the engines behind technological advancement and growth throughout human history. And they've been mostly males. Saying that men tend to be more interested in technology than women doesn't mean that women's interest in CS is purely fixed. It just means that there will always be statistically more males tinkering with technology than females. And those statistical disparities will always ensure that the majority of tech-heavy, companies, and inventions will be led by men.

m_ke 15y ago

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 15y ago
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.
- m_ke 15y ago
  Of course not, but it's Disneyland for engineers and you don't get people from other professions flocking to work there. My girlfriend is a med student and she wasn't a fan of a suggested move to the Valley. My friends in finance dream of Wall Street, those in arts wouldn't trade Broadway for anything and all the fashionistas only hold Paris above 5th ave and SOHO.

jgrahamc 15y ago

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%

Jun8 15y ago
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.
- T-hawk 15y ago
  A female population of 52.5% explains the effect for dating, but not for founding companies. The difference is because it's the surplus that matters for dating but the entire population for founding. Suppose that 42.5% of the population are women in a marriage or committed relationship, and then by definition 42.5% are also committed men. That leaves 10% of the population as single females and 5% as single males, and there's your 2:1 ratio for dating, created by just the small female surplus. Would that hold for founding companies? I don't think so. Any of the 52.5% females could start a business, as could any of the 47.5% males. The small excess of women doesn't create a 2:1 ratio here. (There may be some correlation, that married and settled women are less likely to start a business, but the population ratio can't explain the entire outcome.)
  - Duff 15y ago
    I don't know if the startup founder demographic is well defined enough to make a definitive statement. There are probably significant demographic divisions (race, educational background, housing rent/own ratio, size of industry clusters, national origin, income distribution, etc) that probably have an impact.
- woohoo 15y ago
  The data above doesn't support that - there's only about a 2% difference.

aristidb 15y ago

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.

iamgilesbowkett 15y ago

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

hugs 15y ago

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!")

Cushman 15y ago

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 15y ago
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.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

vishaldpatel 15y ago

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