The year 2017 put gender bias in focus again. Firms must study the numbers if they want to thrive, writes entrepreneur and author Sarah Lacy. In this extract from her new book, Lacy makes the case that hiring women isn't just the right thing to do - it makes business sense too.
Silicon Valley prides itself on being a place that breaks the mould, embracing misfits, disrupting business as usual. We're so radical that we fund college dropouts who've never held down jobs before to build companies. That is pretty radical. Or it was. The first time it was done. Once it becomes the new template for the only thing you fund, you aren't disrupting anything.
The industry's top VCs have actually copped to this. During a 2008 keynote at the National Venture Capital Association, John Doerr (one of the top VCs in the history of Silicon Valley) said to Mike Moritz (another one), "If you look at [Amazon founder Jeff] Bezos, or [Netscape founder Marc] Andreessen, [Yahoo! co-founder] David Filo, the founders of Google, they all seem to be white, male nerds who've dropped out of Harvard or Stanford, and they absolutely have no social life." Doerr took it further, saying, "That correlates more with any other success factor that I've seen in the world's greatest entrepreneurs."
The striking thing about these words - besides that they ignore the existence of Yahoo!'s other co-founder, the Asian Jerry Yang - is that they use pattern recognition to nakedly justify discriminating against women and minorities. Doerr implicitly advises all the other VCs in attendance to do the same. Here's the secret to becoming as successful as John Doerr and Mike Moritz.
VCs who've been in the industry for decades will even argue that "pattern recognition" is their singular advantage. And that's not all bullshit. There are some similarities in how great companies are built. There's a reason so many of them come out of a place where people have seen how it's done over and over again. But this blind adherence to finding the next Netscape, Amazon, Google or Facebook also leads to a lot of the unconscious bias in the Valley. It also excuses a lot of bad behaviour that alienates women and discourages them from wanting to work at startups.
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F or their book What Works for Women at Work, published in 2014, authors Joan C Williams and Rachel Dempsey conducted interviews with 127 successful women, more than half of whom were women of colour. They discovered a near-universal playbook to the bias women face at work, which falls into four main categories: the Prove-It-Again bias; the Tightrope bias of being too masculine or too feminine; the Tug of War; and the Maternal Wall. Of the four, the Maternal Wall bias was the most blatant, in part because many people don't see it as a bias; they see it as biology.
This bias is measurable. Williams and Dempsey cite a study that found that when subjects were given identical CVs, one identified as being from a mother and one not, non-mothers got 2.1 times as many callbacks as equally qualified mothers. They were also recommended for hire 1.8 times more frequently than mothers. There's plenty of data to back up why women naturally make great entrepreneurs, managers and employees.
First Round Capital, a venture firm that's backed hundreds of startups at the earliest stages, including Uber, Birchbox and Blue Apron - produced a report of its internal data in 2015. A key finding was that the female-founded companies in its portfolio performed 63 per cent better than those founded by men. The Kauffman Foundation reported that on average, female tech entrepreneurs generated 35 per cent higher returns than male counterparts.
Across several studies, there is evidence that startups led by women are more likely to survive and to be more profitable. One, by BNP Paribas, particularly highlighted higher success rates - and ambitions - among female entrepreneurs younger than 35.
Beyond startups, McKinsey found that gender-diverse firms are 15 per cent more likely to outperform competitors.
Female-owned businesses in aggregate generate $1.6 trillion (£1.2tn) in revenue in the US, according to the Census Bureau. McKinsey also found that increased gender equality at work could add $12 trillion to the world economy.
I could keep going, but you get the idea: data simply doesn't back up Maternal Wall bias, gender bias, the desires of a patriarchy or any of the lies. Motherhood not only makes you a better leader, but a better employee. No matter if you never intend to start a company or even to work full-time again, know that these four muscles you build from motherhood will make you far better than your peers, if you trust and believe in your own power.
This one may be the most obvious. When you have children, you have the same hours in the day, but so much more you need to get done. You become a beast at multitasking, which is a skill that women are typically already better at than men. Research has backed up the obvious: a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that over 30-year careers, mothers were far more productive than women without children at nearly every point in their careers. And mothers with two kids or more were the most productive of everyone studied.
If you just had a baby, haven't slept properly in weeks, didn't have the luxury of maternity leave and are looking around at the chaos of your home, you probably don't exactly feel like a productivity machine. But this survey should give you hope. It found that young children take a temporary toll on productivity, of 15 to 17 per cent. The first child causes a 9.5 per cent decline in performance and the second child cuts out another 12.5 per cent. A third child decreases productivity another 11 per cent.
However, the declines are temporary, and once the children hit 13 years of age, mothers become far more productive than any other group, and stay that way for the rest of their careers.
Think of those early years like taking time to do an MBA in the evenings. You'll be less productive, sleep less and be more stressed for a few years, but it will pay dividends for the rest of your working life.
Dads got some benefits too, according to the study. Fathers with one child performed similarly to childless men, but men with multiple kids were more productive than the rest of the men studied (although the increase in productivity was nowhere near as dramatic as it was with women).
A recent survey entitled The Elephant in the Valley asked women working in Silicon Valley about their experiences in the tech industry. It found that...
****: 84 per cent had been told that they were too aggressive
****: 60 per cent said they had received unwanted sexual advances
****: 60 per cent of those who reported harassment were unhappy with the response
****: 66 per cent felt excluded from social or networking events, due to their gender
When circumstances - such as taking care of children, ageing parents or a sick loved one - force you to become far less productive, you stumble. However, you find a way to do the same amount of work you did before, in less time. I used to joke that in the first three years of Pando, I was like Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride. People thought I was working hard, but I was pregnant or nursing the entire time. Once I weaned my daughter Evie, it was as if I told the world, "I know something you don't know… I am not left-handed!" and then tossed the sword to the other hand and kicked even more ass.
Nicole Farb, CEO of craft-kit startup Darby Smart, was pregnant with twins when she raised her first round of venture capital. She remembers those early days of building a company with a baby in each arm. It built her confidence in terms of how much she was able to handle. "Strangely, it didn't feel out of control, it felt in control," Farb explains. "In entrepreneurship you often hear the mantra: focus is everything. I didn't know what that meant [before becoming a mother]. It's like, OK, there are five plates in the air and which one is just about to fall? Do I need to shower today?"
A recent survey entitled "The Elephant in the Valley" asked women working in Silicon Valley about their experiences in the tech industry. It found that:
There is a reason the whole "crooked Hillary" thing stuck better as an insult than "no-stamina Hillary": Even sexists realise how much stamina motherhood (and grandmotherhood) takes. When it came out during the presidential race that Hillary lost her footing because she had pneumonia and wouldn't stop working, almost every working mother said, "Yep."
Women simply have to work harder than men to prove themselves - especially once they've had kids. This isn't only on the presidential campaign trail, nor is it only at the office. Women and girls experience this throughout their lives.
Just look at girls' sports at school. In 2008 Michael Sokolove wrote an awe-inspiring and terrifying story in The New York Times Magazine that sought to understand the higher prevalence of injuries in girls' sports.
Part of the difference is biology. A surge of testosterone in puberty means boys can pack on muscle with less work. Oestrogen does the same thing in girls, only it has an effect on fat rather than muscle. Girls have to train that much harder to build muscle, and that can wear out ligaments and risk injury.
But part of it is also a warrior-girl ethos, where they refuse to be sidelined, indoctrinated by a societal pressure to work harder to be considered as much of an athlete as a boy. A girl in middle school recovering from a torn ligament experiences a version of the Prove-It-Again bias that mothers face when returning to work.
This warrior-girl ethos puts girls at risk because they return before they're healed. They also become inured to the pain.
There is a parallel in research on injury rates in US Army basic training. Numerous studies show that women suffer injuries at much higher rates than men. But another study also suggests that women are both more frequently injured and tougher. It takes a bigger injury to knock them out of service. Men, by comparison, leave after sustaining only minor injuries.
Women shouldn't have to work harder to be considered equal, but the fact that they've been conditioned since school to do so may be a reason that female entrepreneurs outperform men - they wouldn't have reached that level otherwise.
Increased stamina and productivity are great. They give you the ability to push for longer hours and make the most out of those hours. But that's all brute force. The most amazing thing to me about motherhood is that the quality of my work also increased dramatically. My voice as a reporter became more pointed, more direct and more aggressive, and my voice as a writer became cleaner and more convincing. Since becoming a mother, I've done some of my best writing and I can do it more quickly.
My brain seemed to become rewired to think more creatively. Part of this is that magic of constraints. Creativity is the way you fight back against lacking the time and resources you think you need.
CEO Julia Hartz had her first child in the early days of building Eventbrite with her husband. She was answering customer-service emails as she was taken in to give birth. Afterwards, she called her mother in a panic because she felt like no one had prepared her for life after she got the career, the husband and the baby… How do I actually manage all these things? "All she could tell me was, 'What got you here will get you there,'" Hartz says. "It was so annoying and not the answer I wanted. I was like, 'Oh, don't pull this Zen Buddhist shit on me.' But, it was the best advice."
What her mother was describing was creative problem-solving. This may be a more valuable skill than the first two. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is not a mother or a father, but has used creativity to disrupt the half-a-trillion-dollar hotel industry. On his first day at Rhode Island School of Design his teacher asked all the students to do self-portraits. They agonised over them all week before presenting them to the class, wincing at the critiques, picking apart what more they should have done, lamenting how they all weren't quite perfect enough.
The next assignment was to do 200 self-portraits in the same time period. "Clearly there's not enough hours in the week," he said. "The point was it was a seemingly impossible solution, but with creativity you can always find a way."
With all due respect to RISD, I can't imagine a greater creative battleground than raising children. Try to imagine explaining concepts like God, sex, war, death, Donald Trump, and why the sky is blue to a three-year-old who has barely grasped the days of the week. Or imagine crawling inside the brain of a toddler, deducing what thing they are planning to jump off when you leave the room - and troubleshooting it before it happens.
It's not just having to come up with creative solutions on little sleep and finite resources. There's something about watching - and encouraging or combating - a child's mind as it develops that unlocks your own creativity.
Newsrooms are tough environments. The daily grind of filling a news hole is fuelled by bad coffee, whisky stashed in desk drawers, all-nighters and grizzled editors who scream profanity-laced tirades when you screw something up or miss a deadline. I was trained to think that's just how the news business is.
I worked for five different editors before starting my own company. Two were phenomenal, three were borderline sociopathic. (Perhaps not coincidentally, the two phenomenal ones were parents).
Managing by screaming and threats is effective, but only in the short term. Managing with empathy and compassion is much more sustainable. The problem is that it's much harder. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner discussed "compassionate management" in a 2014 interview.
"Acting like an asshole is easy," he said. "And often I think some of that behaviour emanates from laziness, because you don't want to take the time to think about what that person is thinking or feeling or you don't want to deal with their energy or their bad day... It's exhausting. But it's the only way to build a team that scales. Bad behaviour is the opposite. It's doing whatever comes to mind."
Amy Errett's hair-dye company, Madison Reed, is very woven into her experience as a mother - it was her daughter who convinced her to start the company, saying her idea to create non-toxic hair colour would "save women's lives". "Mommy, are you going to do it?" her daughter said to her one morning after absorbing months of conversations where Errett was weighing the decision. "Everyone in our family are strong women and you taught me you should do anything you want, so you need to do this."
The moment made such an impression on Errett that she named the company after her daughter. "This brand is about empow-ering women; for me it's personal," she says.
She manages in a very personal way, too. "Managing a group of people is very analogous to parenting. I didn't understand that at a cellular level until I had a kid," Errett adds.
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During the course of reporting this book, I spoke to a dozen or so men who understood these issues. Men who said they preferred to hire mothers. Not to up their diversity stats or to look good, but because they found mothers to be more reliable in getting their work done. Or just because they believe women bring skills to a company that men don't have.
One example is the venture capitalist Mike Maples, whose firm has invested in companies such as Twitter, TaskRabbit and Lyft. When he set out to hire his first partner, he specifically sought out a woman and found one in a inexperienced maths PhD candidate at Stanford named Ann Miura-Ko. The firm is mostly female staffed and Maples likes to say Ann is the one with "the hot hand". Indeed, she is one of just six female VCs on Forbes's annual Midas List, and is on the board of Yale's investment committee. The mix of male and female energy has also made him more likely to admit when he doesn't know something.
Andy Dunn, CEO of menswear company Bonobos says, "Women have better judgment, more empathy and are shown to be better entrepreneurs," he said. "They are financially more astute. Yet we live in a world where men weigh 1.6 times what women weigh, and a couple thou-sand years of history have weighed women down because of that. That's starting to change. And the rate it's changing is accelerating. The next hundred years will be referred to as the female takeover. By takeover, I don't mean 'Run for the hills, guys!'. I mean that your life will be improved by the ascendance of women."
Dunn has no agenda in saying this; it doesn't boost his business or help raise capital. He simply believes it.
Women getting run out of tech matters, because it's where so much of the wealth creation is. I've cited evidence that women, gender-balanced teams and, in particular, mothers, out-perform male-dominated teams. If it's not a case of needing more women to enter the tech funnel, what gives? Unconscious bias and a reliance on pattern recognition is a pervasive problem.
Of course, there's a way to combat this: change the pattern.
Extracted from A Uterus is a Feature, Not a Bug (HarperCollins) by Sarah Lacy, out December 28. Sarah Lacy is the founder of Pando
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
