Women Entrepreneurs?

~ Laura

Suze sent me a link to a Forbes article about teenage millionaires – entrepreneurs who made the millions before graduating from college.

Suze wants to know why the seven entrepreneurs that were highlighted in the article were all men. Even the one who made millions by making jam was male. Are girls less likely to be entrepreneurial or is there a reporting bias at work? 

Published by Laura

3 thoughts on “Women Entrepreneurs?”

  1. Well most of these folks are internet related businesses (the jam & the diesel press are the exceptions). It’s not surprising that they wouldn’t be women, given that women are less likely to be coders.
    But, it would be interesting to know if there’s bias in how the people were selected (it could be gender bias or tech bias or venture capitol bias or monetary bias).
    But, I do think that girls get short shrifted, culturally, on being taught entrepreneurial skills, like selling themselves and their product, taking risks, and managing money.

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  2. I’d be interested to know the role that bias plays (or doesn’t) in that sort of profile, but don’t have time to go looking for more info now.
    But, I think do that attitude/unwarranted confidence is an important element in the kind of VC game this group was playing (and which factored into the selection), and that’s something that girls/women are actively discouraged from developing, though it’s quite acceptable for boys/men.
    Thinking about that sparked a memory of a TED talk a few months ago by Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook. At about the 4:26 mark she tells a story that I think is emblematic of the attitude cultivated by certain types of businessmen and rarely by businesswomen (the story is about how she and her roommate the brilliant scholar and her smart but doofus-y brother took a class together in college; he only read one book and attended only a few classes, but was convinced he’d gotten the best exam grade in the class).

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