Entrepreneurs: not who you think they are
Cross posted from Huffington Post:
If I say “entrepreneur,” whose image flashes into your head? Is it Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook barely out of his teens? Is it a bunch of brash twentysomethings coding madly on their way to Silicon Valley stardom? If you’re a young mother, as I am, it might be that other working mom who just happened upon a million dollar idea while she was whipping up organic baby food in her kitchen. Guess what: none of these stereotypes fits the typical American entrepreneur.
The obsession with venture capital funded entrepreneurship, the big exit, the genius nerd working 24-7 on code is misplaced, and it’s really holding women back. About 41% of U.S. private companies are female-owned, but only 3 to 5% of them get venture funding, according to the Center for Women’s Business Research. But most successful businesses are not VC-funded, and they are not overnight sensations.
I recently started a small business. This is not a venture capital type of business. This is a business that I started to earn a decent living, enjoy the fruits and flexibility of being my own boss, and hopefully do some good in the world. I only hope it will be what people dismissively often call a “lifestyle” business. A lifestyle business, in VC terms, is a business that will not return the multiples a venture capitalist needs to justify an investment. It is a venture that might support its founder and staff, but is not going to be the next Google. This definition is perfectly reasonable if you are a venture capitalist: after all, you need to make money. And we need Google and Facebook. But we need other businesses too. And there is a meme out there in the business literature that women are hamstrung by the desire to create lifestyle businesses, that we’re thinking too small. An investor recently said to me, “You see women starting lifestyle businesses. They are capable of growing large businesses, but they want to stay small. And if that’s what they want, that’s fine.” The implied message is that women won’t change the world by simply starting lifestyle businesses; new research shows that may not be true.
I was lucky enough to be at a small meeting at Harvard this week with Vivek Wadhwa, plus women entrepreneurs, VC’s, and academics. Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic who teaches at Duke and Harvard, shared work he has been doing with the Kauffman Foundation. The results show that entrepreneurs don’t have to be born; they can be made. And they don’t even have to be young!
Spending time with Wadhwa changed my thinking and I realized, perhaps it’s our very image of an entrepreneur that holds women back.
Vivek has been researching what makes an entrepreneur. It turns out they mostly come from the workforce, they are older than we might expect–middle aged–they have families, and want to make it big before it’s too late.
And here’s the thing about women: Wadhwa’s research finds that the profile of successful women entrepreneurs is the same as men. There are some differences: women are more conservative, women rely more on business partners, and need more encouragement than men do. But the life circumstances that lead them into entrepreneurship are not different. Wadhwa includes, “By almost every metric you look at, women-led companies do better than men do. And we’re handicapping these women.”
Wadhwa says too many decisions are guided by the stereotype that the ideal entrepreneur to invest in is Mark Zuckerberg. The people who get encouragement are those young brash white males. The vast majority of founders of companies that have made America what it is are not Zuckerberg. And, says Wadhwa, you end up leaving out half the population if you fund based on stereotypes.
On his blog A VC, Fred Wilson quotes entrepreneur Tereza, who provides a potential solution to the example of Y Combinator, a legendary tech incubator that has funded lots of successful (male) young tech entrepreneurs:
“Y Combinator participants are for the most part very young — in their early 20′s. This is not when women would be most inclined. Women who start businesses like to know what they’re doing, and be trained and experienced in it. That takes up our 20′s. We have kids in our 30′s. Our entrepreneurial sweet spot is around age 40. Conventional tech investors are not really into this group and the metrics they look for are really hard for these people to hit. Most of the (few) women’s businesses that go big were funded by friends & family or strategics, not traditional angels and VCs.”
If most successful businesses started by women who are older and rely on the dollars of families and friends (or try to grow the business from revenue) why do we promote the mythology of the VC-funded firm? Wadhwa suggested that perhaps we should encourage “lifestyle” businesses that encourage women to give a piece of profits to investors over time: He says this would create more jobs over time and encourage long term investment and growth. Sounds like the American dream to me. Now we need to build media and social media energy around changing the VC myth; Rachel Sklar is helping to get this started with Change the Ratio here.
It all comes down to how you define a successful entrepreneur, in the culture, in the media, and among ourselves. Very few are multi-million dollar venture funded efforts, but they can grow to be multi-million dollar businesses. Or not, and that’s fine too.
10:25 am, Tuesday
Tuesday mornings at the park with Ace are literally worth an extra $100,000 per year in salary, I swear.
When I was starting my career no one ever said, how much is having time for you life worth to you? When do you want to have kids and what do you want your work to look like when you do? When you are 33, how much do you want to be working? How much money do you want to earn in comparison to how much time you spend in your office?
This Mother’s Day, I wish for all the future moms that you sit down and think about these questions as you’re planning your work life. The day will come quicker than you think, and you’ll want the option.
The Mommyblogging Mystique
Cross-posted from Huffington Post:
If you’re a mom, you probably work. But isn’t there at least a little fantasy piece of you that would prefer to work when you wanted to, or from home? Wouldn’t you love to have a personal brand that allows you to get recognition and respect without having to show up 9-6 in an office with a long commute? Well, according to the New York Times, if you were a successful mommyblogger, you could do just that: toddler in lap, laptop buzzing.
Smart women online are up in arms about the Times’ Styles section piece. For example Joanne Bamberger put words into many mouths when she wrote in response to the piece on mommybloggers, “Was it really necessary to write a story on a professional blogging conference with the title Honey, Don’t Bother Mommy. She’s Busy Building Her Brand? The headline alone drips with mocking condescension that says to the world that it’s perfectly acceptable to continue to belittle women for the exact same things that men are doing in the online world today. We’ve come a long way? Not.”
This is not the first such mommyblogger story and yet it conforms to a pattern. Like the stay at home mom cum CEO of her own organic foods brand, the well-paid mommyblogger is a fantasy figure for our time. I believe the fantasy of mommyblogging (different than the reality, which is as heterogeneous and varied as the Internet itself) is part of our modern day Feminine Mystique. The fantasy of mommyblogging as portrayed by the mainstream media allows women to gain some power and recognition, but only in the safest possible way. Because after all, these moms are at home with the kids, at least when they aren’t at blogging conferences. Mommyblogging is seen as safe and non-threatening (although if you actually read the best of it, it is far from safe). Women have been getting paid to write about kids stuff for centuries.
Why do we need the fantasy? Because most women feel ambivalent about the reality of our work lives, which is that we have to work, long hours usually, and we have less flexibility than we need. The truth is, we are all of us, men and women, ambivalent about the increasing financial responsibilities women face, which means less time for home pursuits and time with kids. Women earn 44% of household income in the US, and this will only increase, as we’ve just become half the workforce.
A Pew study finds only a small minority of Americans (19 percent) now think women should return to their traditional roles in society. But Pew also finds that most parents think that moms working part-time is ideal. Most parents experience work-life conflict. A 2002 Catalyst survey found 49% of working mothers who were not the sole breadwinner said they would leave their jobs if their husband earned enough money for the family to live comfortably.
Robin Marty writes on Care2, “The obvious problem [with the article], which Mom 101 points out so succinctly, is that it’s still assumed that women who blog are a homogeneous group that sit at home and write up their day to day moments raising their cherubic cheeked progeny in between folding the laundry, making the dinner and catching up on our soaps.”
The public fascination with the mommyblogger is that it’s a non-threatening fantasy of successful womanhood in the Digital Age. The media likes this message too. Part of us want to go back to that life. But since we also have the pressure to use all of our education and earn money (well, in truth, most of us have to earn more than a little money, but we’re talking fantasy here) what better, and more femininely appropriate way to do it than mommyblogging!
Dual-Income Parents: The Exhausted American Middle
Cross posted from BlogHer.com:
Back in the mythic 50s and 60s, housewives like Betty Friedan and Betty Draper were very bored. The Feminine Mystique opens with this description of an average housewife’s day: “Many women no longer left their homes, except to shop, chauffeur their children or attend a social engagement with their husbands.”
Contrast this to the average day of 2009’s Janice Ramos, featured in Joan Williams and Heather Boushey’s new study, “The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict.”
Janice Ramos is a married, 30-year-old registered nurse who lives in a home she owns with her husband, a technician, and two children, an eight-year-old son and a 14-month- old baby. She works the night shift so she can be home with her kids during the day. Her husband, whose shift starts at 9:00 a.m., gets the children up and fed and takes
the baby to a neighbor’s and the older child to school. Janice arrives home at 8:30 a.m. after they have already left. She sleeps for five hours, then picks up the baby and meets her son at the bus stop around 3:00 p.m. She spends a few hours helping with homework and playing with the baby, and then goes to sleep when her husband returns from work around 5:00 p.m. She sleeps until 9:00 p.m., when she leaves to arrive at the hospital at 10:00 p.m.
Ramos is part of what Williams and Boushey call the “missing middle.” These parents, writes Lisa Belkin, are working “highly supervised jobs that often leave them one sick child away from being fired”; these are “Americans who are neither rich nor poor,” and “have a median annual income of $64,000, earning between $35,000 and about $110,000 a year. Their median income has fallen 13 percent since 1979 (in inflation-adjusted dollars).”
The middle is 53 percent of Americans, but the authors say because they are not as vocal and visible as professionals, the infamous “opt-out” group, or as desperate as the poor, they receive the least attention and even less help.
Time is a finite resource. Think of our lives are pies: pieces are divided between work time, home and family time and personal time. Cali Yost explains that conflict arises when our work and home time demands become so great that we simply run out of time. This is the state of many Americans.
Reading the “Three Faces” report is eye-opening and extremely sad because work-life conflict among all income levels is so pronounced. I was most struck by the phenomenon of “tag-team” parents like Janice Ramos in our new two-worker norm. In the study, exhaustion is a common theme of life in the middle. One parent says, “My daughter always wants to do things with me, but I’m too exhausted.”
Are you a tag-team couple? What effects does it have on your relationship and sense of well-being?
Lisa Belkin wrote, “Is work-life balance a luxury? In many ways, yes. Only those with both financial security and some control over their work lives have the freedom to recalibrate it.” Williams and Boushey’s report makes it clear that for married couples, time together as a family is a luxury, much less time for oneself. They also note that tag-team couples are between three to six times more likely to divorce.
Which leads me to the political hypocrisy of our legislators (almost everything I read these days leads me there). The U.S. is hostile to creating federal legislation that supports family-friendly workplaces — and it is this legislation that would help the tag-team parents, those caught in the middle.
Legislation that does exist helps poor women with childcare subsidies. Wealthier women can make more choices about their work and family lives. In either instance, as Williams and Boushey note, “The problem is viewed as not the lack of adequate public policies but rather the personal choices of a small set of mothers who are in families that do not look like most U.S. families. Politicians have actively used these narratives to reject moving forward on a work-family agenda.” Meanwhile, the majority of U.S. families soldier on, with little money, time or breathing room to spare.
Even more ironic?
“Nearly 60 percent of mothers in the middle work full-time or more, but only 42 percent of low-income mothers do. Both parents work full-time or more in more than half — or 51 percent — of all middle-income families as compared with only 15 percent of poor ones. The percentage of full-time work is slightly higher in professional-managerial families —- 57 percent -— but they can do all kinds of things to make life more workable.”
I’m a lucky professional example: The more money I make, the more money I willingly spend to outsource as much as I possibly can.
Families in the middle also pay more, percentage-wise, for childcare than do poor families or those at the top:
In March 2009 dollars, low-income families pay around $2,300 a year per child for childcare for children under age six —- about 14 percent of their income. Families in the middle average $3,500 a year —- six percent to nine percent of their income. Professional families pay about $4,800 a year —- three percent to seven percent of their income.
(Personally, I would be thrilled to only have to pay $4,800 a year for childcare -— I don’t know where that figure is from!)
The report concludes, “If one had to choose a single word to describe life in the middle, it might well be exhaustion.”
Exhaustion is no way to make America great again. The solution, says Williams, “is flexibility without retaliation” from employers. Carolyn Maloney has a bill before Congress: support her. Another key is culture change and recognition: Some hourly based companies with hourly workers DO use flexible work schedules. Working Mother Magazine, for the first time this year, is honoring them, as it has done for years with its “100 Best Companies” to work for.
PS: Listen to BlogHer’s Elisa Camahort Page interview Heather Boushey and Joan Williams.
Morra Aarons-Mele
www.womenandwork.org
Happy Birthday Beth Kanter
Well, that title sounds like a bromance movie.
But I was inspired by this post from Amy Sample Ward. She wrote:
In her birthday wish post, Beth announces that she’s trying to send 53 Cambodian children to school by raising $530. Last week, Stacy Monk and I were chatting and thought that our community could help smash that goal by raising much more funds as well as awareness for the work the Sharing Foundation does in Cambodia.
How does it work?
We’re hoping to inspire 53 bloggers to publish a post today that shares how Beth has impacted his/her work and shares Beth’s birthday wish with his/her blog audience. (Of course, you’re invited to make a gift to make her wish come true as well!)
What’s the point?
We’re hoping to make her birthday a very happy one by:
1. making her wish come true, and
2. reminding her how much she’s contributed to the community.
I knew Beth Kanter from BlogHer and from blogging in general; I admired how she had developed a singular expertise. Back in 2007 she graciously agreed to let me interview her for a paper I was writing at Harvard on bloggers as entrepreneurs. I had a theory that the most successful and inspiring independent bloggers, such as Beth, were less citizen journalists than they were entrepreneurs, using social media to build their brands and create their own path by which to live and work. Who better embodies this than Beth? She has inspired me and many other women who want to work on their own terms, to do really good work while fighting the good fight. After I wrote my paper and finished grad school, I too started my own business, on my own, working for clients who focused on women in the workplace. In my paper, I called Beth “Betty.” I quoted her,
“Betty, who writes a blog about non-profits and social change, notes that her readers are very
demanding. I asked her why her readers like her: ‘The most important thing is consistency. I hear that a lot from readers — you’re consistent, you’re always right. And if I slack off, my subscriber numbers go down.’”
Beth is disciplined, innovative, and true. Happy Birthday!
About Me
Morra Aarons-Mele utilizes social media strategies to help employers, employees and communities connect. She also consults with leading organizations on how women can use the internet for professional and personal development. In her spare time, Morra enjoys blogging about women and politics. Read her full bio >>
Recent Posts
- Work-Life Among Information Workers: Notes from BlogHer ’10
- Entrepreneurs: not who you think they are
- 10:25 am, Tuesday
- Read His Lips: Workplace Flex Not a Women’s Issue
- Blogging from the White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility