Innovating Women

The Changing Face of Technology

Vivek Wadhwa, Farai Chideya

• Publisher: Diversion Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781626814226
• eBook ISBN: 9781626813830
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

From one of Time Magazine's 40 Most Influential Minds in Technology: women across the globe share stories of closing the tech industry's gender gap.
Women in technology are on the rise in both power and numbers, but we need to accelerate that momentum if we want to "lean in" and close the gender gap. The future of technology depends on women and men working together at their full potential. For that to happen, it is vital that women feel welcomed, rewarded, and respected in tech sectors.
Hailed by Foreign Policy Magazine as a "Top 100 Global Thinker," professor, researcher, and entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa, alongside award-winning journalist Farai Chideya, collect anecdotes and essays from female tech leaders around the world, sharing how their experiences in innovative industries frame the future of entrepreneurship.
With interviews and essays from hundreds of women in STEM fields, including Anousheh Ansari, the first female private sector space explorer; former Google[X] VP and current CTO of the USA, Megan Smith; Ory Okolloh of the Omidyar Network; CEO of Nanobiosym Dr. Anita Goel, MD, PhD,; and venture capitalist Heidi Roizen, Innovating Women offers perspectives on the challenges that women face, the strategies that they employ in the workplace, and how organizations can support the career advancement of women.

CHAPTER 1
The Growing Success of Innovating Women

Innovating Women dives into a series of issues and inflection points that dictate how quickly a woman’s participation in the innovation society grows. Each chapter presents a different facet of the challenge and opportunity and includes essays from “innovating women.” This is not just a book; it’s a flag planted in the ground—a declaration of interdependence by the hundreds of women who contributed to this crowdcreated volume. All of them are involved in innovation and entrepreneurship, particularly in the fields of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Using an online platform as well as individual interviews, we collected the wisdom of pioneers from dozens of countries. In turn, by sharing their stories, the author-participants discovered a powerful sense of belonging and recognition.

Quendrith Johnson, the founder and executive producer of Screenmancer, an online portal for filmmakers, said, “This project, through the threads and minds of all these various women, all exceptional in my view, has sort of brought me to the realization of how much of my STEM self is hidden on a daily basis. It is a watershed most likely not just for me but for everyone involved.”

Innovation rises from inspiration. Take the case of Kay Koplovitz. As an American college student visiting London in the 1960s, she saw a poster for a lecture on geosynchronous orbiting satellites. While many students would have been on their way to a pub or a concert, she was thinking, “What an intriguing topic!” Space had fascinated her ever since the Russians had launched Sputnik into orbit.

“He spoke with such passion,” Koplovitz said of the man on stage—famed science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke had served as a radar specialist for the British Army during World War II. He described geosynchronous orbiting satellites positioned 22,300 miles above the Earth—rendering them stationary over a fixed location—as being ideal vehicles for global communications.

Koplovitz had interned as a television producer during her college years. When she became aware of this new tool, she saw commercial opportunities—and freedom.

“One has to remember that this was the time of the Cold War,” Koplovitz said. “It was a time of international espionage and intrigue. Most of us didn’t know that much about what was going on behind the Berlin Wall or the Great Wall of China. And I thought: ‘Wow, it would be really wonderful if we could communicate with the people behind those walls.’

“Back then, we had three broadcast networks in the United States. People thought that was a lot,” she laughed. “The idea of using satellites for commercial, rather than military, purposes seemed far-fetched, but that’s what Arthur C. Clarke had inspired me to envision—I wanted to fulfill that dream of actually being able to connect with people.”

And so, in 1977, Koplovitz founded Madison Square Garden Sports, the predecessor to the USA Network, and then the SyFy Channel in 1992. She negotiated all the first deals to bring professional sports to cable. Major League Baseball was the first, followed closely by the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League, the Masters Golf Tournament, and the U.S. Tennis Open.

As if her entrepreneurial accomplishments weren’t enough, Koplovitz went on to help other women succeed, cofounding Springboard Enterprises, which showcased women-led companies for a select group of investors. Among the female-led companies for which she helped secure funding is iRobot, which produced the Roomba automated vacuum. The company generated $436 million in revenue in 2012. Her grit and determination and her willingness to champion other women in science, technology, and innovation was part of a seismic shift in our business landscape and global society.

Some women have been fortunate enough to amass the resources to directly incentivize the long-overdue gender integration of technology fields. Lynn Tilton runs Patriarch Partners, a holding company with eight billion dollars of revenue. I had her invited to an event at the X Prize Foundation, which is affiliated with Singularity University, the entrepreneurial think tank where I am a fellow. [X Prizes are a series of multimillion-dollar awards for top innovators.]

“I’d say I felt like I was coming home,” Tilton said, “because it was a group of people who were there to really focus on making the world a better place…less so on pushing their own wares and agenda…more on how to combine our minds to change the world.”

Teaming up with me and former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, among others, Tilton gave $5 million to fund a second-tier prize available only to X Prize winners. The X2 Prize was an additional monetary award for any future X Prize-winning team whose leadership boasts a female CEO and has at least 50 percent women—dubbed “The Mother of All Prizes.”

“It really comes down to men understanding that they are much better off with women by their side,” Tilton said. “Including women on top management teams really creates a much more successful enterprise. But until men realize that and embrace it, nothing is going to change. I wanted X2 to go to any winning X Prize team so that team after team after team would be incentivized to bring women to the leadership level from the start. That was my thought process—maybe money would be the reason to [integrate] the teams, and then that configuration would be the key to winning the prize.”

Clearly, extraordinary efforts are being made to raise the fortunes of women in innovation. But what we know now is that the inclusion of women has a positive impact. A study by Catalyst found that: “Companies with the highest representation of women on their top management teams experienced better financial performance than companies with the lowest women’s representation. This finding held for both financial measures analyzed: Return on Equity (ROE), which is 35 percent higher, and Total Return to Shareholders (TRS), which is 34 percent higher.”^[1]

Still, much evidence exists to show that women were hardly getting a fair shake. According to the firm Startup Compass, “Only 10 percent of Internet entrepreneurs across the world are women.”^[2] And yet women innovators today, despite being underrepresented, are rising in influence and achieving transformative gains for society. They are not waiting for men to create a level playing field, although many men are supporters and allies.

Alec Ross, the former senior advisor for innovation at the State Department and the architect of “digital diplomacy” asserts that if American women participated in the labor market at the same level as men did, the gross domestic product (GDP) would be 8 percent higher.^[3] If we, as a global society, allowed women to shine, it would improve our economies, our quality of life, and the range of opportunities for women and girls. And those gains would be even greater in some developing countries. Every day, women innovators stake their success on their own ideas and hard work. They come from diverse backgrounds and put themselves on the line as they build new technologies, often taking on huge societal challenges in the process.

And then there are what might gently be called gender attitude problems in the workplace. We reported in a new research paper, published by the Kauffman Foundation, that 85 percent of female entrepreneurs feel their work environment favors men, and 41 percent blame social and cultural issues for preventing their female colleagues from launching their own startups.^[4]

As Quendrith Johnson explained, “Anyone familiar with the film The Social Network has watched the scene where Mark Zuckerberg is encouraged to print ‘I'm the CEO, bitch,’ on his Facebook business cards. That said everything about gender. If you are lucky enough to be a female CEO, there is a 100 percent chance you have been called a bitch! So, my approach was to put that on the table, but not as a pejorative. My favorite comeback is, ‘I've got a PhD in Bitch. Next?’”

Another one of our collaborators, Rashmi Nigam, a product manager in Los Angeles, raises the issue of discrimination based on stereotypes about working mothers. Despite arriving in the office at 5:30 a.m. and working twelve-hour days, Nigam’s boss at a previous company criticized her for working “mommy hours.” In some technological environments, particularly among coders, arriving at the office later in the day is not seen as a detriment, but leaving “early”—at the time most American workers go home—is perceived as a negative.

We’re not here to sugarcoat the challenges facing women in technology, but we’re not going to wallow in them either. Despite the gender biases in the innovation industries, the meaningful participation of women stands poised for substantial growth. Exponential technologies like 3-D printing, advances in robotics, and the rapidly dropping costs of processing power and data storage have dramatically lowered the cost of starting a business. Arguably, the advent of social media played to the strengths of women as connectors. In the case of Koplovitz and Springboard, women who’d already made it to the top were now extending a ladder for yet more female innovators to climb. It remained to be seen whether the growth of women innovators and their companies will be briskly incremental or hockey stick exponential, but there is no question that the world is ready for women to lead us into the future.

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^[1] “Connecting Corporate Performance and Gender Disparity,” Catalyst, 2004; “Sources of Financing for New Technology Firms: A Comparison by Gender,” Kauffman Foundation, http://www.kauffman.org/what-we-do/research/kauffman-firm-survey-series/sources-of-financing-for-new-technology-firms-a-comparison-by-gender.

^[2] “The Middle East Beats the West in Female Tech Founders,” The Economist, July 13, 2013.

^[3] Cited by Ross: “Women’s Work: Driving the Economy,” The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., April 25, 2013.

^[4] Upcoming report from Kauffman Foundation by Vivek Wadhwa et al. on “The changing face of Silicon Valley”

Women Are the Great Disruptors
Whitney Johnson

Whitney Johnson is the cofounder of Rose Park Advisors, an investment firm built on the principles of disruptive innovation. She is a regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review, a TEDx speaker, and a prolific tweeter on startups and investments.

I discovered the theory of disruptive innovation in 2004, when I heard Clayton Christensen speak about “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” As a sell-side analyst at Merrill Lynch, covering telecom and media in the emerging markets, I immediately recognized that Christensen’s theory explained why mobile penetration was repeatedly beating my estimates—mobile was disrupting fixed-line telephony.

The more familiar I became with Christensen’s frameworks, the more I was convinced that these ideas were just as applicable to individuals—and to me, in particular—as they were to industry. At the time, I had been an institutional investor-ranked sell-side analyst for nearly a decade. I was at the top of my game, but I wanted to make more of a dent in the universe. Theoretically, if I stayed at Merrill Lynch, that wasn’t going to happen. To upend my status quo, I would need to play where no one else was playing.

Within a few months, I quit my job to become an entrepreneur. Many colleagues questioned my sanity. For me, getting to that place of power and respect was hard-won. I had started out as a secretary, moved up the food chain into investment banking, and became an award-winning analyst. Why would I walk away to try my hand at writing a children’s book and produce a reality TV show about Latin America? (Neither of which happened, by the way.) Instead, I ended up blogging about work/life issues for Harvard Business Review and cofounding an investment fund with Clay Christensen. To colleagues and friends, these career moves might have seemed wanton, but when you considered them within the framework of disruptive innovation (the most successful innovations are those that create new markets and value networks, thereby upending existing ones), my career switch made perfect sense.

Lest you think my entrepreneurial stint had been one straight shot up the y-axis of success, let me set the record straight. There have been many times when it was lonely and scary. After the adrenaline rush of quitting my job in 2005 wore off, there were days when I felt a total loss of identity. I could no longer call people and say, “Whitney Johnson, Merrill Lynch.” Those words used to validate me. Now it was just “Whitney Johnson,” and sometimes that wasn’t enough. There were days when my P/E (Puke/Excitement) ratio was so uncomfortably high that it felt like I was on a thrill ride to zero cash flow—as when I backed a business in 2006 that was initially successful, but then failed miserably. Almost by definition, there was that sense of unfamiliarity. If you were playing where no one else was playing, at the outset you felt completely alone.

I was confident that many women who were pushing the envelope of innovation, especially in science and technology, had similar feelings. Between 2000 and 2008, there was a 79 percent decline in the number of incoming undergraduate women majoring in computer science. In 2009, 57 percent of college grads were women, yet only 18 percent of them had computer science degrees. Our society was continuing to project a message that women wouldn’t fit in or didn’t have a place in technology. The entrenched stereotype of a “coder” was the geeky white male. It wasn’t easy to fight stereotypes, but doing the unexpected was exactly what disruption was all about.

Our world will continue to be driven by technology, and we simply cannot afford to leave women out in the cold. Women bring unique talents and perspectives to the table in any field, but they are particularly vital to a world of invention and innovation shaped by tech...

Table of contents

• Innovating Women
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Growing Success of Innovating Women
• Chapter 2: Woman to Woman
• Chapter 3: Educate to Innovate
• Chapter 4: Women for the World
• Chapter 5: The Balancing Act
• Chapter 6: Advancing Women
• Chapter 7: Women Changing the Workplace
• Chapter 8: Women Affecting Funding
• Chapter 9: Transforming the System
• Chapter 10: How the Tech Industry Is Changing—And How We Can Make It Better: Vivek Wadhwa
• Chapter 11: Looking to the Future: Vivek Wadhwa
• Chapter 12: We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For: Mary Grove and Megan Smith
• Endnote: An Ode To Women Like You Transforming the World: Farai Chideya
• Acknowledgments
• Connect with Diversion Books