This book is about the barriers that women face in entrepreneurship and how these problems can be solved by innovating. The author, Vivek Wadhwa, examines different areas of female disadvantage including education, culture and finance to show us where we are going wrong.
Are you seeking for a synopsis of Vivek Wadhwa and Farai Chideya’s book Innovating Women? You’ve arrived to the correct location.
After reading Vivek Wadhwa and Farai Chideya’s book, I wrote down a few significant takeaways.
If you don’t have time, you don’t have to read the whole book. This book synopsis gives you a quick rundown of all you can take away from it.
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I’ll go through the following points in my summary of Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology:
What is the purpose of Innovating Women?
Despite its progress, the present technology sector still has a gender imbalance, as Innovating Women demonstrates. We investigate the lives of outstanding female inventors who are working hard despite all obstacles, using data and case studies to look at prominent players in the technology sector.
Innovating Women is written by who?
Vivek Wadhwa is a fellow at the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University. In 2012, he was included to Foreign Policy magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers list.
Farai Chideya is a multi-award-winning journalist and Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.
Who is it that women are innovating for?
Reading Innovating Women is not for everyone. It could be perfect for you if you are one of the following categories of people:
- People engaged in the technology sector, entrepreneurship, or significant internet firms such as Facebook and Google.
- People who care about gender equality
- Those interested in learning more about tech pioneers’ personal experiences
Summary of the book Innovating Women
Introduction
The most influential women today are the ones you’ve never heard of. They are pioneering business and pushing technical advancements. The chapters that follow describe how female innovators are overcoming hurdles all throughout the globe, from academic accomplishment to commercial acumen and the instigation of critical social change.
Furthermore, it illustrates the incredible hurdles that women experience as a result of the industry’s profoundly – but not irreversibly – ingrained gender discrimination. These chapters are intriguing to read and act as a wake-up call, owing to eye-opening data and compelling human experiences.
Lesson 1: Women make up the majority of technology inventors, yet we typically ignore them.
Consider the technology industry’s inventors. Who comes to mind first when you think of them? Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, or Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple? Is Kay Koplovitz a better candidate? Because she is a woman, you may not be aware of Koplovitz’s outstanding work.
Only males seem to have made technical gains in recent decades. What is the reason behind this?
Women are just as capable of inventing as males; in fact, they are even more so. According to the National Science Foundation, ladies perform mathematically on par with men. Furthermore, there are 140 women enrolling in higher education for every 100 males.
Women, in addition to succeeding academically, have business acumen on par with, if not better than, males. Female-driven high-tech start-ups had lower failure rates than those managed by males, according to a research done by Babson’s Global Entrepreneurship department.
Although this is true, the technology sector often extols primarily the achievements of males. Over the last several years, the TechCrunch Crunchies Awards (the Oscars of the IT sector) have been overwhelmingly given to males.
As a result, you should applaud Kay Klopovitz, a female pioneer who changed sports broadcasting, if you’ve ever watched live sports on television.
In 1977, Klopovitz presented the first professional sports broadcast to cable television in the United States. By watching a presentation given by Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, she came up with the innovative notion of deploying satellites for commercial rather than military objectives.
We may realize that women are even more inventive than males if we heard more about their inventions, such as Klopovitz’s. In our next chapter, we’ll look at the under-appreciated role of women in the IT industry.
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Lesson 2: Women are more successful entrepreneurs than males, according to research.
Is it true that women are more likely to succeed in business initiatives than men?
According to a research conducted by the Kauffman Foundation in 2009, women were more efficient with their money. Women are better at spending the money they start with in business. Women also perceive a more consistent return on their investment.
Women in business also show advanced interpersonal skills as well as a talent for money management. Women, on average, value personal and professional networks more than males, and they create better commercial ties.
Another way that women create excellent business leaders is via disruptive innovation, as Whitney Johnson, cofounder of Rose Park Advisors, describes it. What is the best way to combine disruption with innovation?
Businesses and ideas that challenge the current quo have a better chance of succeeding than those that are out of date. When we analyze how email, for example, wiped out snail mail, we can see how it was a disruptive invention.
Disruptive innovators are women who develop and maintain networks outside of their businesses. This was proved in an essay by a Harvard Business School professor, who showed how women think “beyond the box” to bring people and ideas together.
While everyone may come up with fresh ideas, women seem to be especially adept at converting those ideas into lucrative enterprises.
This is evident in venture capital companies, which are very selective and demanding investors that invest in tiny enterprises in order to help them expand. According to a new research, successful venture capital-backed firms have twice as many women at the top, indicating the importance of their participation.
Lesson 3: Women-led technology companies are tremendously successful, yet they still don’t get enough investment.
Most CEO figures on TV and in movies are middle-aged, suited-up, and male. While we don’t typically see great female CEOs in the media, women-owned and -led enterprises should not be disregarded.
Women are achieving remarkable success not just as owners of their own enterprises but also as entrepreneurs. According to the Center for Women’s Business Research, women hold around 41% of all private enterprises in the United States.
In terms of profitability and growth, women-owned businesses often exceed their male counterparts. In a 2013 assessment of extremely successful businesses, American Express discovered that women-owned businesses grew at a 47 percent faster pace than men-owned businesses.
Female-owned firms also climbed 28.6% between 2002 and 2012, compared to 24.4 percent for all other enterprises. Women-owned businesses are still leading the way!
Despite their success, many women-owned firms find it difficult to secure capital. Despite the large number of women-owned enterprises, only three to five percent of them obtain venture capital investment, according to a survey done by the Center for Women’s Business Research.
There is a clear link between this and gender prejudice. The greatest venture capitalists are thought to be skilled at seeing trends or finding talented entrepreneurs with valuable concepts.
Venture capitalists, on the other hand, are frequently on the lookout for people who remind them of themselves. Only one of the top 100 venture capitalists featured on TheFunded.com is a woman. Investing in white, male nerds is merely a fancy way of saying “pattern recognition.”
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Lesson 4: Women in technology have had a significant impact on society.
Women are making an impact in the world, in addition to creating waves in technology. They are using technology to solve challenges like poverty and injustice. Fighting an oppressive status quo is in the best interests of female entrepreneurs.
Women who are socially and economically excluded exist all across the globe, but this is particularly true in developing nations. In Mexico, for example, the prevalent macho culture drives women into conventional gender roles and hinders many girls, especially in rural communities, from finishing their education.
Mexico is now undergoing a societal transformation, with more women beginning microenterprises with low- or no-interest loans. Women own and run more over two million microenterprises, accounting for 36% of all microenterprises. Despite these exciting new innovations, most microenterprises fail within the first year.
This must change, and women like Leticia Casanueva are working hard to make it happen. With the support of her firm, which provides training and tools such as basic inventory monitoring software, rural women may create and operate financially solid companies.
Entrepreneurial women are not only essential sources of female employment in rural regions, but they also help to strengthen the rural economy.
Resha Jazrawi’s work as a co-founder of Acumen, a firm committed to generating employment for the most disadvantaged, including women, is an excellent example. Accumen’s investments are known as patient investments since they enable companies to grow at their own pace without demanding quick profits.
Acumen’s influence may be seen in Tanzania’s A to Z textile mills, which produce anti-malaria mosquito nets. This investment has not only resulted in a valuable product, but it has also resulted in the creation of 80,000 employment, virtually all of which are geared toward women.
Lesson 5: Gender prejudice is rampant in the IT business.
Gender prejudice is an issue for women in technology right from the outset. Discrimination begins even before they have the opportunity to begin their jobs.
Many women and minorities are intentionally discouraged from pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) is riddled with gender stereotypes, with many women reporting that despite succeeding in school, they were told they were not talented enough to pursue professions in STEM.
Female students are frequently accused of being “too social” to work in science, based on the assumption that women are too social to do so. According to a Beyer Corporation poll done in 2010, 40% of females and minorities who were educated as chemical engineers and/or chemists were discouraged from pursuing their jobs.
Even if a young female student succeeds in completing her education and starts looking for work despite this discouragement, she will face prejudice once again. According to a Bright Labs survey, 92.7 percent of network engineers, 91.5 percent of PC technicians, 90.4 percent of IT support technicians, and 90.9 percent of software engineers are essentially “male exclusively.”
In spite of this obvious imbalance, high-earning companies have not taken any steps to correct the situation. According to a McKinsey & Company survey, only 8% of large companies had women in more than 25% of the top jobs. We can see the statistical and social evidence for this.
“I don’t have anything to say to you since I’m a technological geek,” one entrepreneur in Uruguay told Agustina at a tech conference. This investor thought that women were uninterested in or knowledgable about technology.
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Lesson 6: Because of motherhood and family, women entrepreneurs confront particular hurdles.
High-ranking male executives are easy to admire. Keep in mind, however, that these guys have an advantage: unlike women, who must choose between profession and family in order to attain their ambitions, these men are free to pursue their careers.
Female professionals have significant challenges in this area, since the corporate culture is typically hostile to working mothers. Rather of catering to the family-oriented perspective, many start-ups pander to the single guy mindset.
Leaving work at 5 p.m., for example, has been frowned upon in the sector. Even when women report beginning their job as early as 5 a.m. and working as many hours as men, the stigma of working “mother hours” by their male colleagues continues.
Networking during “happy hours” – late at night and on weekends – is also a part of entrepreneurship. As a result, many women are obliged to pay a “female tax” by declining to participate in these extracurricular activities in favor of caring for their children.
Formal support networks are developing to help career-oriented women with children, which is a good thing. Some progressive governments provide assistance to women on maternity leave and guarantee that they are not discriminated against in the recruiting process. In Germany, for example, the Elterngeld system allows parents to receive 67 percent of their wages while on leave.
The majority of males, on the other hand, do not use their parental leave. As a consequence, women are often left to care for their children. According to a research performed by Stanford University, mid-career males are four times more likely than their female counterparts to have a spouse who is responsible for the home and children.
Despite this, our societal conventions dictate that only “bad women” place a higher priority on their profession than their family.
Lesson 7: Unfortunately, sexism in the workplace still exists in the technological business.
Despite our wishes for its abolition, sexual prejudice still exists. On a daily basis, women are subjected to it to varied degrees.
Previously, we learnt about the “female tax.” Women must also consider what they wear, including make-up, style, and sex appeal, all of which must be considered before they begin their day. Female businesswomen have included this into their teaching of younger workers in certain circumstances, advising them that how they dress affects their success.
Many women, like Catherine Rose, project manager for LightAide, an interactive teaching tool, are disappointed to discover that their degrees are not regarded as highly as their appearance. This tendency is also reflected in the mainstream media.
Kim Polese, an entrepreneur and technology executive, was featured in Fortune magazine with a close-up of her face and was dubbed a “femme fatale” of the IT world. Polese had asked for the emphasis of the piece to be on her software management firm, Marimba.
Unfortunately, women in technology are also vulnerable to open sexual harassment. Because he was a former Apple international developer, he had firsthand knowledge.
When Roizen was working for a multimillion-dollar software corporation, he was on the verge of negotiating a contract with a major computer manufacturer that would define his company. The manufacturer asked her to sign a contract over dinner at a high-end restaurant, and during the meal, the company’s vice president grabbed her hand and pressed it against his crotch. When she stormed out, the transaction fell through. Millions of dollars were lost.
In some of these expressions, sexism still exists in the high-tech business.
Lesson 8: We can reform employment procedures to empower women by identifying their challenges.
We’ve seen firsthand how women in the IT business encounter a variety of obstacles. Is there going to be any changes?
Denial just diminishes responsibility and keeps the harmful status quo in place. Despite the fact that such debate may not be warmly accepted, we must confront gender disparities in a public space.
Silicon Valley: You and Some of Your VCs Have a Gender Problem, a 2010 essay co-authored by Vivek Wadwha, looked at the disturbing gender discrepancies in high tech businesses. There was a massive outcry, and top officials openly blasted the author on social media. According to several of his coworkers, there are quicker methods to get laid.
The piece also drew criticism since it revealed Twitter’s unbalanced demographics: all of the company’s board members and executives were men. The group’s leaders were vehement in their attacks on individuals who brought up the gender problem. Twitter’s CEO, Dick Costolo, disputed that there was an issue.
Following the inclusion of a woman to Twitter’s board of directors in 2014, a slew of other digital businesses followed suit. Clearly, Twitter had to go through a public relations crisis before being able to affect good change in their organization and the lives of others.
The first step in overhauling the IT sector is to change employment procedures. Gender equality may be accomplished through expanding recruiting pools. At universities, the number of female STEM graduates is equal to, if not larger than, the number of male STEM graduates. If companies hire straight from graduate schools, they will have a larger proportion of female candidates accessible right away.
Another way to increase diversity is to use quotas. Quotas have been utilized effectively in sports management as well. For example, the National Football League’s “Rooney rule” assures that minorities be vetted for management jobs. This method might assist technology businesses by guaranteeing that a specific number of roles are filled by women.
Final Thoughts
We need to expose the IT industry’s boys club. For starters, for the sake of the smart women who, while being business-savvy and high academic achievers who are also moms, confront problems on a daily basis. Furthermore, for the progress of the technology sector now and in the future.
If you believe that a job in technology is solely for nerds, you should reconsider. Women in technology today are inventive, powerful, and inspiring, demonstrating that women can not only become leaders, but also play an important role in the sector.
Additional Reading
If you enjoyed Innovating Women, you may be interested in reading the following book summaries:
Innovating Women is a book that you should get.
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