Group items tagged

what the executives don’t give as much thought to are some of the simplest determinants of how successful a company will be in hiring diverse candidates. Will women have any input in the hiring process? Will the interview panels be diverse? Will current female employees be available to speak to candidates about their experiences? Many times, the answer to each of these questions is no, and the resistance to make simple changes in these areas is striking.

We have to tell these companies to talk just as proudly about their parental-leave policies, child-care programs and breast-pumping rooms. At the very least, they need to communicate that their workplaces have cultures where women are valued. They need to show they’re not places where attitudes like that of the now-infamous Google engineer who wrote a memo questioning women’s fitness for tech jobs dominate.

executives balk at my suggestions and even wonder if explicitly talking about the place of women is sexist. But I remind them that when it comes to gender, they have to play catch-up, after long histories of eroding trust

Silicon Valley companies are in love with themselves and don’t understand why the love isn’t always returned by the few women to whom they extend employment offers.

I’m often asked which companies are getting diversity and inclusion right in Silicon Valley and across the country. Most aren’t.

The tech industry “can’t claim to lead innovation at the same time it lives in the dark ages about the value of women and their ability,”

The National Venture Capital Association, an industry trade group, welcomes these legislative efforts

The study’s authors found that investors tended to ask men questions about the potential for gains and women about the potential for losses. Both men and women expressed the bias against women founders.

investors adopted what’s called a promotion orientation when quizzing male entrepreneurs, which means they focused on hopes, achievements, advancement, and ideals. Conversely, when questioning female entrepreneurs they embraced a prevention orientation, which is concerned with safety, responsibility, security, and vigilance. We found that 67% of the questions posed to male entrepreneurs were promotion-oriented, while 66% of those posed to female entrepreneurs were prevention-oriented.

Every prevention question posed to an entrepreneur meant $3.8 million less in funding for their companies FOR EACH QUESTION. According to the study, entrepreneurs who fielded mostly prevention questions raised $2.3 million in aggregate funds for their startups through 2017. That’s seven times less than the $16.8 million raised by entrepreneurs who were asked promotion questions.

The research that formed the core of the study consisted of the authors observing initial due diligence between 140 investors (40 percent of whom were women) and 189 entrepreneurs at TechCrunch Disrupt New York.

male-led startups raised five times more funding than companies led by women. The study and its findings go a long way to explain the enormous gender gap in venture capital funding in the U.S.

Women startup founders raise roughly 2% of all venture funding, even though they own 38% of the businesses in the country, the study’s authors write.

Women contribute to 25 percent of the GDP growth. Women are starting more companies. Women outperform men in both brokerage performance as well as hedge fund performance. Why not see how this plays out in venture capital?

In the tech industry, women under 25 earn on average 29 percent less than their male counterparts. Women of all ages receive lower salary offers than men for the same job at the same company 63 percent of the time. They hold only 11 percent of executive positions at Silicon Valley companies and own only 5 percent of tech start-ups. Only 7 percent of partners at the top 100 venture capital firms are women. It is no wonder that the rate at which women quit tech jobs (41 percent) is more than twice as high as the corresponding rate for men.

By and large, women are the only ones distressed by such dynamics. Eighty-two percent of men working for start-ups agree that their companies already spend the “right amount of time” addressing diversity. Nearly half of women — 40 percent — disagree, saying inadequate time is devoted.

We can’t afford to wait for the tech industry to police itself — and there are few indications that it will ever do so. Consider what lawyers for Google said in May, in testimony in a suit alleging wage discrimination against women: It would be too burdensome for the company to collect data on salaries.

t’s hard to foresee serious government intervention coming from the current administration. Nor can we wait for bad press and shareholder class actions to force out negligent chief executives responsible for cultures of inequality.Instead, women in the industry should collectively consider their legal options. Top among these would be class-action discrimination cases against employers.

The tech sector is not the first white-collar “boys’ club” to demand an industrywide correction. In the 1990s, Wall Street firms faced a slew of class-action discrimination lawsuits.

The lesson of these cases is clear: Class-action lawsuits can force industrywide change, even in the most entrenched, male-dominated industries.

Women in tech no doubt have hurdles to bringing class-action lawsuits, including the requisite preponderance of statistical evidence and the prevalence of confidentiality clauses and arbitration agreements, which are, in effect, designed to pre-empt class actions. But this challenge doesn’t mean the suits cannot be brought, or won. This is a route that the women of Silicon Valley should consider, especially if regulation is not an immediate and viable solution.

Advancing women’s equality, which includes minimizing the gender gap in labor force participation, holds the potential to add $12 trillion to global G.D.P. by 2025.

“It’s not about the skills, it’s about who’s doing the work. The work gets valued in different ways depending on who is doing it.” That’s why, Hicks pointed out, today software developers have a higher status and pay than people who do quality assurance and testing—jobs that require similar skills but “because of who usually does these jobs are valued differently in a way that is disproportionate to the content of the work.”

he fix for it doesn’t involve a better pipeline, she says, but changing things at the top. We have an opportunity to do that now, she says, because “tech is becoming more diffuse; the higher you go, the fewer tech skills you need.