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Sparkle (3)
In its October 2010 issue, Vanity Fair did its 100 "new establishment" people - some of the 100 spots are occupied by teams, others by individuals or duos. The formal name of the list is "the 100 most influential people of the information age." Guess how many women are in the new establishment? A total of 14 women, and of those, six are paired with men, while only eight are recognized on their own, individually. The menz? A few men must share the spotlight in team settings, but those team props simply add to the total number of included men further dwarfing the total number of women.
Oh - stop being such a whiner everyone wants to say these days, right? After all, just two days ago on BNET, Mark Henricks wrote a post called, Why It’s Time to Stop Giving Women Entrepreneurs Special Help. His theory:
The Center for Women’s Business Research said in its 2008-2009 report on women-owned business that 40 percent of all businesses are 50 percent or more owned by women. The center also said in the same report that the number of women-owned businesses was expanding at twice the rate of businesses in general, and has been doing so for two decades.
These figures may well understate the number of women-owned businesses today. In 2008, for instance, an official in the Small Business Administration’s office of women-owned business told me, an accurate updated count would probably show that 44 percent of all businesses were woman-owned.
So if 44 percent of all businesses were woman-owned in 2008, and women-owned businesses were multiplying twice as fast as other businesses, shouldn’t we soon be in the position of having roughly the same number of women-owned businesses as there are women in the population?
Yeah, well, let's go back to looking at who is the top woman on the list - and how top is she:
The first spot out of 100 that recognizes a woman: #23. And lucky #23 goes to someone I'm sure you are all guessing would have to be at the top of a list of the 100 most influential people of the information age: Lady Gaga (yes, I'm being sarcastic - or maybe just showing how not new establishment I must be for disagreeing with this selection).
I know. I know. I know. It is just a list - by now, someone should have started a blog about how lame lists are in general. But even so, how are women continuing to not make a dent in the brains of the people who are doing the evaluations? How does BlogHer.com get double-digit millions in venture capital, as a, you know, information trafficker, but Vanity Fair, which includes all the usual suspects upfront, doesn't get it?
Lest you think that I'm too obsessed with these kinds of exclusions, read what Cindy Gallop of If We Ran The World has to say in a post about the need to change venture funding (which is inextricably connected to the entrepreneurship trajectory) for women:
I was just looking today at Vanity Fair’s new establishment list The top 100 of what they call the new establishment. The top three slots occupied by Mark Zuckerberg of facebook at number 1; Steve Jobs of Apple at number 2 and Sergey Brin & Larry Page of Google at number 3. The first woman appears on that list at number 23 (Lady Gaga). So the reason I say that its critically important to be taken seriously financially is because it’s not until women raise rounds of funding at the level that men are raising in men founded ventures; until women sell their businesses for huge amounts of money; until women get funded for very, very substantial amounts; until women rank more amongst the billionaires of this world & the tech billionaires of this world that most people will actually believe that a woman can be successful in the technology sector as an entrepreneur & startup founder. So women have to absolutely have
