Leadership Pipelines

From the press release:

From the article:

In the 1970s, Irene Dorner was sure that with the surge of women joining her in the working world, the financial industry would start looking pretty equal before long. It didn't seem so far fetched to Dorner, now the CEO of HSBC USA, to expect that by the time she was 40, "the ratio would be 50/50 in all the places that mattered."

It hasn’t happened. While we are no longer in the openly discriminatory era of "Mad Men," when only white males had a serious chance at advancement, the world of banking and finance, like all the well-paying professions, still has what social scientists call a "leaky pipeline." Women enter the lower rungs at roughly the same numbers as (or even in higher numbers than) men, but their ranks thin out the higher you go in terms of pay or position, until women are vastly outnumbered at the top.

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From the article:

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And now as I dip my toe back into the entrepreneurial world I see a very different landscape, a landscape that helps me keep my faith in the global economy.

Here's what I see: Women can save the day.

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Christine Cheng and Margit Tavits
Informal Influences in Selecting Female Political Candidates
Political Research Quarterly June 2011 64: 460-471, first published on November 17, 2009 doi:10.1177/1065912909349631

Abstract

The authors argue that the gender composition of party gatekeepers—those responsible for candidate recruitment— plays a crucial role in either encouraging or discouraging women candidates to run for office. Using an original data set that includes constituency-level information for all parties and candidates in the 2004 and 2006 Canadian national elections, the authors find support for this proposition. Women candidates are more likely to be nominated when the gatekeeper—the local party president—is a woman rather than a man. The results underline the importance of informal factors for understanding women’s political underrepresentation. 

From the Vancouver Sun:

The key to getting more women into Canadian federal politics lies in getting more women into party executive positions, a new study suggests.

U.S. and U.K. researchers analyzed data from Canada's five major political parties during the 2004 and 2006 federal elections, and determined that presidents of parties' riding associations were more likely to field candidates of their own gender. Thus, female riding association presidents were more likely to recruit women, while male presidents were more likely to recruit men.

Ideology notwithstanding, a party's candidate is six per cent more likely to be a woman when the party's riding president is also a woman, suggests the study by Christine Cheung, a Canadian at the University of Oxford, and Margit Tavits of Missouri's Washington University, published this week in Political Research Quarterly.

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From the article:

When Marissa Mayer was growing up in the 1980s, she knew only one female computer scientist. Now Ms. Mayer is a vice president at Google Inc.—and a role model for many women entrepreneurs. She also is helping create a new generation of female founders by investing her own money in women-led companies such as discount home-decor site One Kings Lane and online invitation company Minted LLC.

"Encouragement can't be underestimated," 36-year-old Ms. Mayer said. "Now we have Google, Facebook, Twitter and others touching the lives of girls in middle school, and you have people saying, 'Well, gosh, how do you build that?'"

A growing number of U.S. female executives, mentoring groups and women investors are helping to crack the glass ceiling in start-ups. The percentage of women among start-up capital seekers grew to about 20% last year, up from 12.6% in 2000, according to the University of New Hampshire's Center for Venture Research. Of those women, the number who received funding grew to 13% in 2010, up from 9.5% in 2008.

"It's not that women before were not networking, but now it is a much clearer path," said Theresia Gouw Ranzetta, a partner at Accel Partners, a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm that was an early investor in Facebook and has financed women-led companies such as online handicraft marketplace Etsy, beauty-products company BirchBox Inc. and personal-finance website LearnVest.com.

The growth of fields such as fashion and e-commerce—where women have held top roles—have opened more doors. "A male [venture capitalist] will think: she's a woman, she understands the buyer better than I do," said Dave McClure, founder of seed venture fund 500 Startups. Of the 140 companies Mr. McClure has invested in, he estimates that 25% were founded or co-founded by women, and 12% are run by women.

Despite this progress, women are far from being on equal footing with men, a notable disparity in an industry that prides itself as a meritocracy. Women represent just over 15% of angel investors, and only 5% to 7% of partners at high-tech venture capital investor firms in the U.S., according to a recent study by Illuminate Ventures, an early-stage venture firm.
In an attempt to close the gap, a number of mentoring and investing organizations have popped up or grown significantly over the past few years, such as Women 2.0, Golden Seeds and Pipeline Fund.

In August 2009, designer Alexa Andrzejewski, who focuses on product strategy, research and design, attended a Women 2.0 workshop aimed at helping women to launch a start-up. She initially wanted to create a cookbook, but came out of the eight-week mentoring program thinking it would be better to build an app for Apple Inc.'s iPhone that served as a field guide for food. At the workshop's finale pitch event, she landed $5,000.

The feedback and money she gained from other women founders gave her confidence to start her own company. In January 2010, Ms. Andrzejewski co-founded Foodspotting, an online service that lets people snap photos of their favorite food dishes and share their location with fellow foodies. That May, she quit her consulting job, and two months later the company received $750,000 in funding from a group of angel investors and well-known early stage investors such as Felicis Ventures, High Line Venture Partners and 500 Startups.

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