What I learned about women & business today
Friday afternoon is Women & Entrepreneurship, a speaker series with sixty girls... and me.

Today we had a panel of five women, all at roughly the vice president level of their respective organizations. Three were from Wall Street, one from NBC, and the last from Campbell Soup.

As I walked to class in the rain, the questions raised by today's thread were still fresh in my mind. So I was pleasantly surprised that some of the discussion was useful for understanding why there aren't more female entrepreneurs.

Today I discovered something. That is, if you take the time to ask women about their impressions of the business world you can learn some interesting stuff.

What follows are some of the more insightful points that were made. I'm not making any claims about "the nature of women." Rather, I'm just echoing what was said. (I'll try to separate my commentary from the actual points.) So, in no particular order:

1) All of the panelists believed that women were just as ambitious as men, but that ambition for women was different than ambition for men. I didn't get a clear explanation of this, but it seemed to involve family and work-life balance.

What surprised me most was that every single panelist had turned down various promotions over the years. Partly this was due to wanting more time with family. But several of the panelists also stressed the importance of lifestyle, so getting a job they liked less which required more work was seen as a lose/lose, even if the pay was substantially better.

2) All of the panelists talked about how women needed to promote themselves more. They told stories about how all the younger men they mentored would send them daily emails about what they'd been up to and the progress they'd been making. The women were "nowhere to be found", even if they were working just as hard or harder than their male counterparts. The panelists expressed that women tend to believe that if they just work really hard then others will magically notice and reward them. Maybe this makes me a bad person, but I couldn't help but thinking that the average woman's faith in meritocracy is most common in males who are perceived as spectrum autistic.

3) The panelists all expressed profound faith in the ideals of professionalism. There was much talk of what clothing a professional should wear and how a professional should speak and act. Many of them told stories about being asked to order lunch for the group and expressing shock because "that's not how a professional should be treated." This contrasts sharply with the average entrepreneur, where part of the appeal is escaping professionalism. Whereas entrepreneurial orientated males often find corporate culture to be constrictive and stifling, these women viewed it as a protection mechanism of sorts, offering safety and predictability.

If the typical women, fresh out of college, doesn't particularly value maximizing her incoming and prefers corporate culture, then it would make sense why she would prefer joining an established company. This is especially true if she has full faith in the corporate hierarchy to promote her based on merit, a rather dubious assumption.

4) The women expressed frustration that white men typically don't give women and minorities as harsh feedback as they give other white men. The view was that when men are afraid to criticize women then what ends up happening is that women don't improve and get passed over for promotions without knowing why. The emphasized the need for women to constantly ask for feedback from their bosses and mentors, as well as for men to be more honest with women.

5) There was a lot of frustration that men didn't really understand the concept of having kids. The view was that once you have a baby you are seen as being on "the baby track" and no longer on the rising professional track. It's a little awkward being the only guy in the class and having to listen to middle-age women talking about how their children were conceived and the implications for their career, so I'll avoid going into too much detail. That being said, a lot of smaller businesses have never had a woman go on maternity leave and don't really know what to make of it. This goes back into the theme of the corporate environment offering certain safety mechanisms.

They also expressed that the hardest part of having kids wasn't necessarily when they were infants, but when they got older. One panelist told a story about her kid who was having certain problems around kindergarten, so she had to take a couple months off from work to take him to see various specialists.

6) The panelists talked about how successful women are typically perceived as being very cold, and how they have to work to combat that.

This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. It seems like the stereotypical successful male tends to have more or less have the same basic personality they had in college, only with better looks and judgment and social skills. Whereas the personalities of the really successful women I've seen tend to be completely different than that of any girl I've ever met in school. I'm not sure if business just has more of a transformative effect on women's personalities or if the women bound for Wall Street success are just so rare that I rarely see them.

I've also noticed that there aren't really many charismatic female leaders. When will we see a female version of Steve Jobs or Warren Buffet or even Seth Godin? Or maybe there are women who come off as really charismatic to other women and being a guy I just can't see it. Perhaps it's unfair to ask these questions, but I think it's important. There's definitely a charisma bonus for men in business, and it's not additive, it's multiplicative if not exponential.

7) The panelists stressed the importance of learning negotiate, since negotiation isn't a skill that many women pick up on their own. Many also stressed that it was easier to negotiate coming into a firm than once you were already an employee, since internally you never know who you're going to piss off or what bridges you're going to burn.

8) Four out of the five women played sports in college. This really impressed me, especially since these women went to school around the time nineteen Yale rowers stripped in the dean's office with Title IX written across their chests: http://www.aherofordaisy.com/

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If you search Amazon for books about women and business, there are hundreds of books targeted toward women looking to succeed. However, there is not a single book written for men about understanding their female co-workers. Not in the sense of how to talk to them, but in the sense of creating a systemic environment that's tolerant of varying perceptions and aspirations. Perhaps this is why most discussions about women and business eventually devolve into random speculation about "the nature of women" and whatnot. It seems like there is real research into this though and there is something useful to be said on the topic, even if most companies currently build their policies and culture through trial and error.

Anyway, I apologize for the length and any spelling/grammar mistakes, but hopefully this has been useful, or at the very least interesting. In any event, after listening to today's speakers I got the impression that getting more women to hit the submit button on the YC app is really the last step in a long process as opposed to the beginning.