🚀 Becoming a space explorer: digging into problems and opportunities as a new founder
By: Nadia Eldeib
Tags: Technology, Women, Startup, Founders, Product

1. 🙋‍♀️ empowering women

Women continue to earn less and are underrepresented in the C-Suite, particularly in male-dominated fields.¹ The women who successfully enter fields such as math, science, and technology are more likely to lack confidence in their competence and ability. Even when they are recognized as high-achievers, women in these fields are more likely than male peers to shrug off praise or lowball their own abilities.² Beyond this confidence gap, there’s also a promotion gap. For every 100 men promoted to manager, only 85 women were promoted. The gap is worse for Black women and Latinas: only 58 Black women and 71 Latina women were promoted per 100 men.³

A frequently offered “solution” is for professional women to champion other women. One study found that women at Harvard Business School in the top quartile of centrality (central and connected to people with many contacts in the MBA student network) and with an inner circle of 1–3 other women landed leadership positions that were 2.5 times higher in authority and pay than their female peers without this combination. Meanwhile, women in their class whose networks most closely resembled those of their successful male peers (with centrality but no female inner circle) took jobs with some of the lowest authority and compensation.⁴

In the workplace, however, senior-level women who champion younger women are more likely to receive negative performance reviews.⁵ Since there are fewer women promoted to senior-level roles at every level, there are fewer potential senior-level women to champion and uplift other women. This creates overhead for existing senior-level women, who already face additional pressure and stress as compared to their male peers.

Senior-level women in the workplace are significantly more likely than men at the same level to feel burned out, under pressure to work more, and that they have to be “always on”. They’re at higher risk for attrition and are about 1.5 times more likely than male peers to think about downshifting their role or leaving the workforce because of COVID-19, often citing burn out.⁶

Taking an “off-ramp” or career break is a privilege. Off-ramping is increasingly unaffordable, particularly for women with dependents. In January 2019, 15% of women in the workforce said they would like to off-ramp but can’t afford to do so. Moreover, while 89% of off-ramped women want to resume their careers, only 40% successfully return to full-time employment.⁷ Off-ramping often comes with significant opportunity cost: rejoining the workforce is hard and, if women do, they generally earn less and have less job security.⁸

Why should we try to address these problems now? There is some early signal that we may be nearing a tipping point at which meaningful change could be accomplished. At the beginning of 2020, the representation of women in corporate America was trending up and in the right direction. This progress was most pronounced for senior management roles: from January 2015 to January 2020, women in senior-vice-president roles grew from 23 to 28%, while representation in the C-suite grew from 17 to 21%.⁹

So, what opportunities are there to empower women? Some that jump to mind are: