(Where are) the Women Entrepreneurs in Tech?

The WSJ had a go at the dearth of women in Tech (by which I think they mean ICT, as in my experience there are loads of women chemists and biologists) and asked why:

Only about 11% of U.S. firms with venture-capital backing in 2009 had current or former female CEOs or female founders, according to data from Dow Jones VentureSource. The prestigious start-up incubator Y Combinator has had just 14 female founders among the 208 firms it has funded.

The “where-are-all-the-women” meme is a familiar one, and not confined to the technology world. But in start-up land, where the good idea is supposed to trump social status and everything else, the lack of women in positions of authority stands out.

Various Tech worthies stepped in, none so much as TechCrunch, who points to quite a well known problem for conference organisers:

Every damn time we have a conference we fret over how we can find women to fill speaking slots. We ask our friends and contacts for suggestions. We beg women to come and speak. Where do we end up? With about 10% of our speakers as women.

We won’t put women on stage just because they’re women – that’s not fair to the audience who’ve paid thousands of dollars each to be there. But we do spend an extraordinary amount of time finding those qualified women and asking them to speak.

And you know what? A lot of the time they say no. Because they are literally hounded to speak at every single tech event in the world because they are all trying so hard to find qualified women to speak at their conference.

Unfortunately this is one of those areas where a lot of very "sensitive" people live, so it is virtually impossible to have a rational, fact based conversation (just try and imply that the science continually implies that male and female brains are different for example. ).

Also, people tend to neglect the simple maths. I did a BSc and an MSc in Engineering, and men outnumbered women at least 10:1 in both degrees. It starts there, with the basic ratios skewed like that. It won't get better until that ratio changes.

Also - for what its worth, my own experience from managing, working with and being managed by women is that:

(i) By and large women in any role are (usually) more competent than men in the same role - having a woman boss is usually a terrific experience. But these women don't seem able to see and believe it.

(ii) Women (and I am generalising here) have a different way of learning something. They like to master X before moving on to Y. Men career wildly across the whole piece (hence the use of "career"?), covering more ground initially, but making far more errors in the process. They tend to end up in the same place over time but women are often not given that time, because.....

(iii) Women are less confident in putting themselves forward, even though they are usually at least as competent as the men. I found more than once that I had to work hard to persuade very capable women to do something, whereas far less competent men were clamouring to persuade me they could do it.

And here is the rub - when it comes to the wire, and it's your *ss on the line too, you give the task to someone who has enough confidence and enough competence.
So the question is threefold:

- How does one attract more women into the overall field to start with? Assuming men and women are entrepreneuarial to roughly the same degree, 10: 1 is not a good starting ratio!

- How does one have a rational conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of women, and what sort of opportunities play to their strong suit?

- Why are women more backward about coming forward, and how can that be overcome ?

Until these issues can be honestly addressed, there will always be a problem with women entrepreneurs in IT.

Update - Following a few Twitter exchanges, Shefaly Yogenrda has written a very thoughtful piece in response and JP Rangaswami takes an interesting viewpoint about exclusio.