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Recently, Brazen Careerist founder, Penelope Trunk, wrote a blog post that unleashed a torrent of diverse and sharply divided opinions about women's career pursuits in comparison with men's in the tech start-up world. In Women Don’t Want To Run Startups Because They’d Rather Have Children, she described what she sees as the incompatibility of the mandatory amount of time and energy required for pushing a tech start-up with raising kids. And then, she tied up this incompatibility to why women don't get funding:
Startups move at breakneck pace, under a lot of pressure to succeed bigger and faster than any normal company. And women don’t want to give up their personal life in exchange for the chance to be the next Google. Or even the next Feedburner. Which is why the number of women who pitch is so small, and, therefore, the number of women who get funding is small.
...
And I’m not even going to go into the idea of women having a startup with young kids. It is absolutely untenable. The women I know who do this have lost their companies or their marriages or both. And there is no woman running a startup with young kids, who, behind closed doors, would recommend this life to anyone.
For men it’s different.
After just over two weeks, the post has nearly 500 comments -- and they run the gamut. It a fascinating, infuriating and enlightening thread. But is it empowering?
For that, we turn to a New York Times column by Gloria Feldt, "Where Is the Female Steve Jobs?", that was published just before Trunk's post. In her piece, Feldt, a long-time advocate for women's rights and most recently the author of No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think about Power, says:
While men might have shaped the culture, women have bought into it. I’ve repeatedly seen women come to power and step back. We put boundaries around our visions of what we can do. I’ve done it too. Fighting for others, in my work for Planned Parenthood, seemed worthy. Fighting for myself, or something I wanted, did not. We have a conflicted relationship with power that plays out in the worlds of work, politics and personal relationships.
I spoke with Gloria on behalf of BlogHer.com in search of suggestions for how to understand Penelope's contributions, those of the commenters to her post and Gloria's own philosophy about women, career and power.
BH: How do you see the role of social media and the Internet in terms of how women can leverage these tools?
I was participating in the International Leadership Forum online starting about 25 years ago. When you’re communicating over the Internet about topics you otherwise might have been talking about over the dinner table or in a business setting, and you have both men and women present, and you’re communicating in a way that all you see is the written word and you are not hearing the voices, and it’s asynchronous, and you can absorb it [at your own pace], it levels out the decibels. The men's voices [literally] are not louder than the women's. We all knew each other, and if we had been sitting around in a room, the men would have been louder, but I think that the Internet has made it possible for men's and women's voices to be at the same decibel level.
The advantage of this is, in part, simply people’s attention. There's not a woman to whom I have spoken who hasn’t had the experience of putting forth an idea and then a man says the same thing five minutes later, and it’s the greatest idea since sliced bread. In the business world especially, men's voices are heard when women’s aren't. But partly, it's the attention and a higher level of risk taking that men have for putting ideas out. Women will wait and defer but men just talk.
The downside of social media is that it is a very seductive time suck. You think you're really doing something but you’re not really doing much. You can spend a lot of time accomplishing very little. But the upside is that it allows for an enormous amount of flexibility. You can do anything you need to do from anywhere you are. It's helpful
