Expand Your Mind: Women’s Dubious Progress
by Miki Saxon
Three steps forward and five backward, that’s a description of the progress women have made over the last 40 years. I was reminded of this by several articles over the last couple of months, but it was really driven home by, of all companies, mighty, “do no evil” Google.
Let’s start with a history lesson. Back in the 1970s when women first asserted themselves they were accused of being aggressive or even a bitch. In spite of making up 50% of the workforce nothing much has changed.
As one woman put it, “Even in this day and age, a guy barks out an order and he is treated like someone who is in charge and a leader. But when a woman communicates in the exact same way, she’s immediately labeled assertive, dominating, aggressive and overbearing.”
Many people think that technology companies are different, more accepting of women and that that is especially true of startups, but it isn’t—and when it comes to raising money you would think that it’s 1960.
Women own 40 percent of the private businesses in the United States, according to the Center for Women’s Business Research. But they create only 8 percent of the venture-backed tech start-ups, according to Astia, a nonprofit group that advises female entrepreneurs.
But when Candace Fleming was raising money for Crimson Hexagon, a start-up company she co-founded in 2007,… a potential backer invited her for a weekend yachting excursion by showing her a picture of himself on the boat — without clothes. When a third financier discovered that her husband was also a biking enthusiast, she says, he spent more time asking if riding affected her husband’s reproductive capabilities than he did focusing on her business plan.
The problem is global according to the 2010 Corporate Gender Gap Report co-authored by INSEAD and the World Economic Forum.
Female employees tend to be concentrated in entry or middle level positions… A major exception to this trend is Norway, where the percentage of women among boards of directors is above 40 percent for the majority of respondents. This is due to a government regulation that mandates a minimum of 40 percent of each gender on the boards of public companies…The average for women holding the CEO-level position was a little less than 5 % among the 600 companies surveyed. Finland (13%), Norway (12%), Turkey (12%), Italy (11%) and Brazil (11%) have the highest percentage of women CEOs in this sample.
None of this surprises me—it’s more or less business as usual.
But Google’s recent action really floored me. Google, the company that left China because of forced censorship, is censoring ads for cougar dating sites.
Google has recently deemed those dating sites “nonfamily safe,” and therefore its ads for such sites containing the word “cougar” will not be allowed on so-called content pages.
However, they see nothing wrong with sites that hookup young women with sugar daddies.
Google continues to allow similar advertising for the many sites that match older men and younger women, like DateAMillionaire.com, which assures its clients they can meet “sugar babies.”
I’m disappointed, are you?
Flickr photo credit to: pedroCarvalho on flickr
May 24th, 2010 at 1:19 pm
Yes I am very aware of this. The ‘womens libbers’ of the prior generation would be saddened by our lack of progress. I see it in my grand-daughters generation too – we go to the store and it is pink, frilly cloths and mini kitchens, vacuum cleaners/cleaning stations, ironing boards for little girls. Yes they need to do those things too but I bought my grand daughter a play set of building tools and a play lawn mower. Things cannot change as long as parents continue to stick children into gender assigned molds?
May 24th, 2010 at 3:19 pm
Hi Julie, you are so right. It’s funny, we tell kids X and when they turn 18 we tell them Y, expect them to instantly forget X and then get upset when they don’t.