Theme One: Teach a Woman to Fish, Save the World
This argument is a given among leaders now: empowering women and girls globally is crucial to global security, ending violence, and lifting countries out of poverty. This year, almost 32% of the commitments from public and private entities at the Clinton Global Initiative directly impacted women and girls through classroom education, health education, micro finance and other teaching tactics. It’s crucial, lifesaving work.

CGI is a public private partnership, but the heavy lifting in creating such programs has been done by NGOs, governments and other charitable entities, according to Dr. Isobel Coleman from the Council on Foreign Relations. She says if you add up all the money spent on women by NGOs and other non-profit organizations it’s somewhere under $5 billion dollars. This is significant money but pales compared to the estimated $1 trillion alone of investment capital wanting to invest in socially responsible business. Dr. Coleman notes, it is crucial to enlist the private sector in this empowerment to really make change.

At CGI, Andrew Kassoy, Co-founder, B Lab said there are 60-70 million consumers who WANT to buy from good companies. And many companies, whether explicitly socially responsible in their charter or not, have the intention to have a positive impact on society. But it’s tough to make money and it’s hard for socially responsible businesses to scale. Many explicitly pro-women businesses are in this spot.

Theme Two: Women are Power Consumers, Hence They Have Power
Nearly every US-focused public conversation will touch on women’s sheer might as consumers of goods and services. Organizations usually seize women’s purchasing power as proof of the strength of women’s voices in the marketplace. I’m not sure this translates. And frankly, if I hear this statistic again, I’m going to scream: women drive 85% of household purchases. Women are the “Chief Household Officers.” Women are the power consumers…you know the story.

This information is accurate, valuable and hey, I make my living largely from it. But it’s not enough to change the balance of power and improve the global plight of women. I’ve written before how the single-minded emphasis on women’s role as power consumer is the new Feminine Mystique. I don’t see much evidence that women’s predominance as consumers of packaged goods, etc. translates into our larger power.

Theme Three: If Things Are Really Going to Change, Women Need More Access to Capital

Empowering women as producers of economic wealth is the hardest part of the equation to solve. There is incredible work being done globally and in the US in the micro-finance sector, but women need access to capital beyond the micro scale. There are two examples I want to highlight below of how this can be done at scale.

Wal-Mart’s recent commitment to empower women is an example of bringing socially responsible business to scale but also of an organization committing to tackle the hardest question behind women’s lack of global equity.

In a strong new women’s empowerment initiative, Wal-Mart has taken the lead doubling sourcing from women suppliers, source $20 billion from women owned businesses. They promise to track and measure their actual spending with women suppliers worldwide and hold themselves accountable. This includes large and small batch producers of goods and services.

Wal-Mart also pledges to work with more women professional services providers, such as lawyers, ad agencies, accountants and technology firms. Yes, Wal-Mart has a tough record when it comes to championing women in the workplace. But ultimately, it’s empowering women as key producers in the multi-billion dollar Wal-Mart supply chain. The vision, according to Executive Vice President for Corporate Affairs Leslie Dach, is to bring about a “global marketplace where women’s contributions are really and truly valued…Helping women live better will make Wal-Mart a stronger business.”

It’s not micro, and while it’s a PR campaign, there are real numbers behind it.

And yes, in a press conference to announce the initiative, he noted women are the majority of Wal-Mart shoppers. But I’ll forgive him that one.

Second, there’s great energy afoot to increase the number of women on corporate boards of directors. The average Fortune 500 company board is only 16% women. This means corporate decisions that affect us in the US and all over the world are 84% made by men. Doesn’t that figure put the “82% of purchases are made by women” figure into a stark new light?

At a launch for the new non-profit organization 2020Women on Boards, both MA State Treasurer Steve Grossman and CEO of PAX Worldwide Joe Keefe, who runs a mutual fund featuring only companies that invest in gender equality, drummed home this simple and powerful point: women hold more power than we think. Not only are many women individual investors in mutual funds, but our pension funds, unions and employers are among the largest holders of company shares. Every year, we are sent proxy forms and we usually throw them out or check the boxes suggested. But these boxes approve Boards of Directors, and we can use our proxy votes to change things; we need to read them, and scout them for gender diversity. There are also several new databases that host the information of thousands of qualified women Board candidates. This is a powerful way to change the ratio and get more women on Boards.

Because it’s all about numbers, and all about scale.

Disclosure: I did consulting work for Wal-Mart at a past job in 2005.

The parade of thinkers, revolutionaries and world-crafters was as diverse as those who are leading change. And honestly, I believe it was women’s role in the uprisings in the Middle East this spring that inspired such diversity at this year’s conference in lower Manhattan. This doesn’t mean to sugarcoat the events or outcomes in the Middle East, but to acknowledge the very true public role of women there.

Because the medium is the message, we need to always look critically at who is up on the big stage driving discussion at major conferences. It’s who you see who sets the agenda, and if you have worked in the technology or media space for some time, you know that a constant refrain from producers is, “I wanted to invite more women, but I just couldn’t find them.”

Even the inimitable Kara Swisher just wrote “about how all the often touchy-feely men entrepreneurs of the hottest Web 2.0 companies ha[ve] a glaring problem. While most of them have women as a majority of their customers, they could not seem to find even one qualified woman for any of their boards. This makes it a struggle even in programming our D: All Things Digital conferences. We have featured almost every significant female tech exec we could.”

At the PDF Conference, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand was the most senior U.S. elected official to speak. Senator Gillibrand spoke to the crowd about her commitment to using the Internet to make politicians (including herself) more accountable to voters. Amid other speakers’ vivid snapshots of the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, Senator Gillibrand referred to the drive for more transparency in the U.S. Congress as “a quiet touch of revolution.” For example, Gillibrand will publish her Federal Election Commission campaign finance disclosures online, in easily searchable electronic format. She also put all her earmark requests online so voters can see what money she is requesting.

Gillibrand drew praise from the Sunlight Foundation’s Ellen Miller for voluntary disclosures she makes already, including her schedule of official meetings, voting record, and federal funding requests.

New York’s Junior Senator also touched on the issue of accessibility. She said we need to make sure all Americans have access to the internet, and she is working on increasing funding for rural broadband access.

Gillibrand is 44, not quite a Digital Native but of the generation that recognizes digital issues are paramount to American competitiveness and that Internet facility and access are key. It’s a far cry from a highlight of the conference in 2008, when digital strategist Tracy Russo asked of then presidential-candidate John McCain “how can a person who doesn’t know how to operate a computer be the kind of leader we need to move us forward and fulfill the potential all of our tomorrows hold?”

Three years later, in the aftermath of the economic collapse, the revolutions in the Middle East and social media’s role in each, I can’t imagine a viable U.S. leader admitting, as McCain did, that he doesn’t “really do computers” (insert Anthony Weiner comparison here).

Keep reading at BlogHer.com

My mom was a highly educated educator but she stayed home to raise us. She and my dad had a deal: she was “the inside man” in our family growing up. My father was the “outside man” and he earned a good living for us all. He couldn’t do it today, not on what he earned. But earn it he did and we had a nice life. Until she and my dad divorced, and my mom went back to work, and the home economy became cereal for dinner and a messy house. There’s a lesson in that.

I, on the other hand, can do almost nothing manual (I am a pretty good cook). I’m grateful to have the education and skills to earn a decent living, and so that’s what I do.

The website Primary Dilemma offers a way at looking at working mother “methods.” Founder Lynn Hall identifies five types of working mom methods- methods, I think, are the way we balance responsibilities at home and work. Although I like to defy typology, I suppose I fit into “equalizer”- equally engaged in work and parenting. This is a label I’ll proudly wear.

However, the downside of being an equalizer is that everything besides parenting and working becomes a nagging problem to be solved. And because I spend all the time I’m not earning a living trying to parent and be a wife, I outsource everything domestic I possibly can.

Recently, to help move house, I hired a woman I found on Craig’s List to help pack boxes. I figured paying her to pack so I could work made economic sense. But Barbara helped shift my thinking about how I invest my time. Barbara writes a blog called“The Chief Cook and Bottle Washer,” an old saying I’ve become fond of. Barbara explained her typical week to me: as the stay at home mother of three she’d planned meals carefully, assembled a shopping list, and on Tuesdays, had leftover night, in which the fridge was cleaned out and dinner was whatever was left. Nothing was wasted and convenience food was minimized.

This approach impressed and frankly stunned me. My approach to cooking has become as unbalanced as my work days (constant checking of email when I’m supposed to be with the kids, and vice versa): we’d either scrounge around for cereal or whatever is in the fridge, or I’d spend way too much at Whole Foods on an elaborate, organic spree, and feel guilt after. There was no sense of purpose or sense.

I need to save money and regain pride in my domestic role. I know that as a professional working mother I’m supposed to outsource as much as possible to retain time for parenting, but I think this approach leaves us alienated from our home environment, and possibly, even more broke than we already are after paying for childcare.

The lost art of home economy gets confused with craft and decorating “porn.” Home economy is not about buying expensive materials to create elaborate crafts, and it’s not about cooking exotically or keeping the perfect home. It’s not about Martha Stewart Living and the plentiful, aspirational approach to domestic consumption. It’s about practical consumption.

There’s been much written, mostly aimed at men, along the Shop Class for the Soul bent. Books and articles ask men to return to the soulful craft of making things with one’s hands. “Artisanal” and “locavore” have become clichés. But what’s a working mother who wants to simply manage her costs, not become Pioneer Woman or start another urban farm?

It’s been a big discussion and challenge among my friends: how to be more mindful when it comes to household consumption. Here is my small start.

Simply, stick to a monthly household food budget. I’m starting with grocery shopping and I’m reclaiming my wifely role as ‘chief cook and bottle washer.” Each week, I have a shopping list and a shopping budget. I’m buying less convenience food and packaged kids food, which is incredibly expensive. I’m trying to buy organic, but only what’s on special.

I’m trying, like Barbara, to plan meals ahead, and only buy what I need. It’s a powerful shift in thinking and it’s a lot of work.

Domestic economy is more work than working.

It’s a profound honor to be a part of ONE’s Mom Advisory Committee and to recognize Mother’s Day here today with all of you.

I’m a mom of four from Pittsburgh, Penn., and I co-run a website for mothers called The Motherhood. We’ve learned many truths about mothers through our community, but these three remind me the most of what we are focusing on with ONE:

1. Even though mothers often carry the burdens of the world, they do so on strong shoulders.
2. Moms have an unmatched ability to “make it happen.”
3. A mothers’ DNA carries within it the mantra, “leave everything better than you found it.”

In other words, mothers make the world go around.

We witness it all the time. Ordinary moms, every day, see a need — and without hesitation do what they can to make a difference in that need. That is why I love formally bringing moms into ONE, with all that represents and everything it will help make happen.

Maria Mchele Mwasonge of Tanzania is a powerful inspiration to me as we move forward.

Maria and her five kids used to sleep on a rag that covered the floor, but that all changed when Maria was trained how to grow sweet potatoes.

From her small potato farm, Maria has built a thriving business. Now her children go to school and the family lives in a new home. Other farmers have learned from Maria how she grows the most nutrient-rich plants, and in the process local health clinics report that malnutrition in the area’s young children has dropped.

Even when she sleeps, Maria said, she thinks about her potatoes.

(If you haven’t already, be sure to read the ONE report “Africa’s Future is Female,” which includes Maria’s story.)

An age-old description of mothers popped into my head when I read about Maria: “She is a tree of life to them.”

“Them” is certainly her children, but when it comes to mothers, many times “them” means everyone she can help or lift up in her own way.

Today at 1 PM ET, The Motherhood will be hosting a live, text-based talk with the ONE Campaign and Every Mother Counts to celebrate mothers everywhere. Please join us and share what inspires you about mothers and learn more about what we can do to help mothers and kids around the globe who need us.

We hope to see you there!

PS. This amazing video by Former First Lady Laura Bush is a beautiful reminder that for moms, one child is every child. I hope it motivates you as much as it did me!

Follow Cooper on Twitter: @coopermunroe

I recently taught a digital skills workshop for graduate students at Harvard’s Kennedy School. A guest in the audience, who was about 45, raised her hand and said, “Well, you’re all so young. What about women like me? Is there a space for us in social media”?

The twentysomethings in the audience immediately supported her with comments like, “My mom is my Facebook friend!” The truth is, the fastest growing demographic group on Facebook is women over 55. And in almost every age group, Facebook is growing faster with women than men. Women are over 56% of Facebook’s audience, and 45% of Facebook’s US audience is now 26 years old or older.

For mid-career women, becoming social network savvy is serious business. Whether you’re working for a large company or for yourself, you need to establish a digital brand. Women Online will be ready to help at the Conference for Women with our interactive session, “Using Social Media to Establish Your Brand.” In the meantime, here is some food for thought about why it’s so crucial you engage online:

- You’ll get access to new networks. Research shows that women’s social and professional networks look different than men’s, and this can hurt us professionally. Women tend to have fewer weak ties, more all-female reference groups, and more contacts who are peers, less who are superiors. As the network scholar Howard Aldrich wrote, after work, “men head for cocktails [or golf], women head for the dry cleaner.” Online media fundamentally changes this equation. You can be at home and still engage in the virtual cocktail party.

- A digital brand is portable and permanent. Women can lose out professionally because most of us take some time out of the paid workforce to raise children. If you take time off to have a baby or opt-out of a career ladder progression, your online presence can still grow and burnish your professional reputation. Your online brand is layoff proof and it can grow with you as your expertise grows. For all generations, jumping in and out of the traditional workforce is “the new normal” according to Ellen Galinsky and the Families and Work Institute. Keeping up a strong professional profile online allows you to stay engaged even if you’re not officially working.

- Establish your expertise and credentials. Digital publishing and creating a strong digital brand allows you to establish expertise in your field while bypassing traditional gatekeepers or barriers to success. Google rank plus links to your work=credentials in the digital age. Again, research shows women feel the need to be more credentialed before assuming positions of power. Strong use of social media allows us to build credentials without breaking into traditional networks (if we’re part of those networks, even better—we can link out to more women).

- Strong community ties. We get by with a little help from them…online friends build social capital, plus they’re a wonderful addition to life. Online community can help busy women feel connected, listened to, and recharged, on our terms and at the time of day that works for us.

Learn more at the Conference: please join my colleague Susan Getgood at “Using Social Media to Build Your Brand.”

Morra Aarons Mele is the founder of Conference Sponsor Women Online, a digital PR and marketing firm (www.wearewomenonline.com). She is an Internet marketer who has been working with women online since 1999. She helped Hillary Clinton log on for her first Internet chat, and launched Wal-Mart’s first blog. She has written for BlogHer.com, Huffington Post, MomsRising and Guardian.co.uk and has covered events from the White House to the campaign trail to Harvard Law School in her role as a blogger on women, politics, and work. Morra is the author of “Women and Leadership in the Digital Age,” part of the upcoming Sage Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership.

Her husband, her story, was so sordid. But Elizabeth Edwards’ is a woman of such articulateness, it’s hard for me to group her in with her slimy husband. I’ve reposted our interview below.

I had the honor of interviewing Elizabeth Edwards last week in Cambridge. I said, “I’m going to interview you for BlogHer.” She said, “thanks for doing that,” and I said “your fan base on BlogHer is beyond” and she said, “these are my people.” So, “people”…

Does the media cover elections as if candidates were Hollywood celebrities, bestowing coverage on who’ll make the best copy and sell most?

Elizabeth Edwards thinks so. When she spoke at Harvard’s Kennedy School last week the thrust of her public address was this: campaign coverage focuses less on substance and more on personality. In a race dominated by two “mega-celebrities,” she used Senator Joe Biden as an example of media slight that created an avalanche of negative effects on one “by any measure a serious candidate.” Biden had but one appearance on the front page of the New York Times. There were more news articles about Elizabeth than about ten of the presidential candidates! The “narrative template” of the media’s choosing was an African American man and a woman. And the media went there, and the result was sky-high ratings for election news.

“Who got to decide this?” she asked about the media’s anointment of certain candidates over others. “Whoever decided this probably also decided that Fred Thompson was a serious candidate for president.” She pleaded for less Britney Spears, who even graced the Atlantic Monthly’s cover, and more dissection of critical issues like health policy. Instead we get “strobe light” journalism to make the sound bite. You have to craft a “zinger,” she noted. Mrs. Edwards can master the zinger but she is a truly thoughtful person and I wish she were running for president. So much for journalistic objectivity, there, but I’m no journalist.

I wanted to talk to Elizabeth about civic life, since she is a true civic leader, not just a political leader. I asked her, “what happens after Election Day? We’ve seen it before- there’s a huge surge, excitement, people vote and then…what would you say to young progressives about how to keep people involved”?

One of the things that John and I tried…OneCorps. As you’re working, you’re out there, meeting with the other volunteers. We need to think about this post-Election period and where will people turn their energies. Our hope was that people would turn their energies to their communities. We hoped people would turn towards a potential candidate, great potential candidate… say “how can we help them” In particular try thinking about it outside the progressive community- thinking, ‘I’m gonna do an anti-poverty project and I’m gonna go to that Baptist Church and see if they want to do it with us and build the bonds there’…and maybe doing something else that would appeal to another group. People get used to working with one another to make the communities better and stronger. We try to do it through OneCorps, it helps, people feel like they’re part of a bigger network if we have something [formal]. Whoever is the candidate, win or lose, one of the things they should do is build that operation into something that’s more civic-minded. The problem is that the way you do that is you use your email list, and the email list is a commodity that civic organizations are unable to afford. One of the things I want us to be able to do is to donate the list to OneCorps…

Politicians have a political agenda, so it’s important to incorporate those who aren’t running again. But “if people understood their own power and their own ability to change their communities…. It’s especially important if McCain wins the election because he’s against government activity that supports the work of organizations like OneCorps.

Let’s talk about why women don’t run for office, and how moms especially can get engaged in civic life so we can start thinking about running?

I think one of the reasons- and not having considered running- or not seriously considered running myself- I think money is really important. EMILY’s list is really important. We are unlikely to have-this is historical- the donor base that men are likely to have. I know we’re used to juggling home and work, and politics is more demanding than most jobs, in terms of the time it’s going to take, at least to do it well. It often also requires being in Washington [DC] away from family, or being in the State Capital. Your family has to be ok with that…The women who are in Washington have launched a move to Washington, particularly the ones with children. Men, it’s much more split. McCain is an example…very often the wives and the children stay at home in the home district or the home state and the official moves to Washington. Women have a much bigger family decision to make.

Me: Is there any solution or is that how it is?

That’s how it is. I think there are just some things we have to say, that’s how it is. ….the way I’d like to improve it is I’d like to see the men to feel the same responsibility! I don’t want it to move in the other direction…I kind of think families ought to live together- that’s one of the things that makes us a family. Certainly as much as our blood makes us a family, living together makes us a family.

I don’t think we feel hesitation anymore whether we can be effective advocates, whether we can be effective candidates. I think it’s lifestyle that keeps us from running [for office]….If we had public financing we’d have a lot more people engaged.

We talked a lot about the effect of money on our elected officials.

There are certain things you wish you could do sort of “candid camera” and we could follow people around congress…to everything…they could go to the bathroom themselves but that’s it. And people couldn’t arrange their schedule…to meet with “Mothers of Dead Soldiers” or things like that all day long. The distance we now have from them, the lack of transparency, we don’t have that connection. We get it back maybe a little bit during campaign season but…

[after Election Day}

“But everyone goes home. I think that’s what it’s gonna be. Even if Obama wins…Hillary has exhibited a toughness that has quieted some people’s concerns that she’s a woman. Obama has appealed to people as this gentle, thoughtful man. People want to see the toughness too.

So I asked her about the role of soaring rhetoric in this election cycle:

“It’s getting people excited and that’s really great. It’s also raising people’s expectations perhaps unrealistically. Jimmy Carter was a really nice man, with a really good heart…but what he didn’t have was the capacity to change the rhetoric of his vision into action. And as a matter of fact, the sort of naïve way in which he had approached it meant he faced even more hurdles than someone who was practiced

What do you think of the whole “bitch is the new black” approach- is that an effective strategy?

“No…I am concerned with the way in which the percentage of women voting for Hillary, the percentage of African Americans voting for Obama, will change. I’m afraid—as many Democrats are—of disaffection in these groups when their candidate is no longer in the race. Because the appeal has been made— not so much by the candidates— but certainly by surrogates and others—this pitch has been made that this is important, for your gender, for your race. In a way it is important for them. But I’m concerned about the disaffection when the candidate is no longer in the race. That’s the real argument for the forced marriage between them, is the possibility of disaffection.

I actually disagree with Elizabeth on this point. I don’t think if Hillary doesn’t win the nomination that women voters will feel disaffected. I think new precedents have been set and the bar’s been moved. Do you? I do wish for a ticket with both Obama and Clinton.

I closed with asking Elizabeth about her civic role in coming years. She said until she can’t make anymore contributions, people will keep hearing from her. I know she said she hasn’t seriously considered running for office but I encourage her to re-think. We need her.

For more recent Elizabeth Edwards news:

Kate Phillips covers Elizabeth’s speech at the Kennedy School, including her fantastically moving answer to the eternal question about criticism about having cancer, young kids, and staying on the campaign trail: New York Times Caucus Blog

Click here to watch Edwards’ public address and Q and A.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this thread and discussion. I have a lot of guilty feelings about child care and being a working mom (so much so, I’m going to be in the Boston Globe Sunday magazine soon being interviewed about my mixed feelings about all this stuff). But in my work, I’m immersed in research about working parents and changing gender roles and all that and I try to be objective too. There’s no question we’re in the middle of a huge shift, and we’re the first true group of moms who consider it completely expected to both work and raise kids. But our society is still so conflicted about women’s dual roles, and I think we are too, personally and in our relationships. I know my husband is. I know part of him wishes I stayed home and he could have a hot dinner at 7pm every night. Sometimes I do too! I love being on maternity leave and going to Whole Foods and reading recipes and going to playgroups and such. We are totally the “shift” generation- men and women are in the middle of a major shift in roles and expectations. It’s very confusing, I think.

But objectively, I have to say that I think we are all being too hard on ourselves and we need to take a breath and give ourselves a pat on the back for doing all we do and accomplish.

Statistically, our generation spends more time with our children than any previous generation, and that’s even with a majority of women working outside the home. We are also so much more parenting-focused than any previous generation, and it may perhaps come at a cost to not just us, but our kids. Hence the whole “helicopter parenting” fear that’s arisen in the States. There is so much pressure to be a good parent and I just don’t think other generations felt it as much. They just did the best they could.

From the NY Times: “Before 1995, mothers spent an average of about 12 hours a week attending to the needs of their children. By 2007, that number had risen to 21.2 hours a week for college-educated women and 15.9 hours for those with less education.”

But the best news is that fathers spend strikingly more time with kids than any previous generation. For me, this is the most wonderful part of the shift. Maybe what kids lose in mommy-time, they gain in a dad. And that must be worth something good.

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.

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.

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!