Accessibility of Entrepreneurship
November 8, 2007 | by Andrew Hyde
I have wondered quite a bit about what brings people into being entrepreneurs. For some it is handed down from their family while others (like me) start companies out of nothing more than a strong desire.
The model of Startup Weekend is that anyone can attend, no matter your experience. You can join any team you would like as well, and even bounce around if you so desire. I didn’t really see the power of this until last weekend in Chapel Hill, where two members of the usability team were employed during the week as a motherboard designer and a network engineer. Both were quite good and enjoyed the experience and introduction to a new part of running a startup. The lesson learned is that the weekend is a great introduction to a startup, and there are certain demographics would love the opportunity.
Something that astounds me is the lack of female entrepreneurs out there. I don’t see really good reasons why the scale so tipped (David Cohen wrote about this earlier this year). The average Startup Weekend has a 20% female attendance, which is much higher than what I have seen at most startups and something I hope gets higher as we do more. I am going to continue reaching out to organizations such as BlogHer but feel like there is much more that I and the community can do.
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3 Responses to “Accessibility of Entrepreneurship”
By Victoria Pickering on Nov 8, 2007 | Reply
Andrew -
As one of the female attendees, thanks for writing about this. I’ve spent a long career as a consultant and entrepreneur in technical/mathematical/financial fields, and have generally not seen any increase over time in the limited female percentage. Startup Weekend, or at least the one I attended in D.C., is I think a pretty comfortable environment for females (proving my rough rule of thumb that the smarter the group, the less that gender matters). But I think that to make any real inroads into the male/female disparity, the changes and encouragement need to start at high school age or earlier.
By Paula on Nov 9, 2007 | Reply
I’ll write a more serious response later, but I just want to point out that I’m glad I got my hair done a couple of weeks before Startup Weekend. Who knew all of the photos from the weekend would end up featuring my hair only: the 2 WashPo photos and now this one…
By Deb Lavoy on Nov 10, 2007 | Reply
I believe that there are 3 key reasons for this. One is risk aversion - in general, women are more risk adverse than men. 2. Gender Politics. For the same reason that women have a hard time being welcomed into the upper ranks of large companies, men do not always welcome partnerships with women. 3. Many women are mothers, and very few mothers want to work 60 and 70 hour weeks.