Why Do We Have an All-Female Team?

Spoiler Alert: We want the best!

I had a realization today while thinking about our team at my sociological research toolbox startup AmeliorMate; We are all women. I did not intend to start a company founded solely by women. I did not intend for our first team of interns to be solely women either, but here we are.

I pondered how this was possible in a community (startup/tech) so thoroughly dominated by men. I thought about the characteristics I look for in co-founders and employees: talented, highly intelligent, motivated, a truly nice person I’d like to work with. I came to realize that, in my experience, these traits are more easily found in women in the space than in men.

I thought back on my years right out of college supervising interviewers for the Nebraska BRFSS. It was like management boot camp, with 45+ interviewers employed at any given time ranging from teenagers to retirees. I created training programs and materials for them while developing and improving the quality of the work produced by each one.

During that time I realized something; If I had two employees who seemed to be equally capable, the female employee always had a higher ceiling after mentoring. Always. The male interviewers, for the most part, knew what they were capable of and weren’t ashamed to showcase their talents. The female interviewers, on the other hand, were less certain of their abilities and did not want to come off as arrogant, which oftentimes killed their confidence.

I was no exception to this social conditioning. I first I realized I needed to start a company when I saw major problems in the survey research industry no one was addressing and it seemed no one had an intention of addressing (my instincts were ultimately shown to be correct by the 2016 election polls).

When I first started, I thought “this is something the world needs. If I don’t do it nobody else will, but I am probably not competent enough to pull it off so I’ll just start this company and then try to get acquired by a bigger company capable of bringing it to its full potential as soon as possible.”

Never mind the fact that my particular skill set and way of thinking lend themselves extremely well to entrepreneurship and starting, growing, and running a company (one time when I was an interviewer at Gallup, I had a manager look at my strengths and exclaim, wide-eyed “those are CEO strengths!”)

It just didn’t seem like something I was meant to do. I wasn’t technical, I didn’t have much experience in business (most of my experience is in non-profits), and I was sure I would mess up at some point. (Luckily I now realize that’s true for everybody and does not disqualify me!)

It wasn’t until I watched video footage of the Y Combinator Female Founders’ Conference that I realized I was capable of more. Until then, I didn’t realize domain expertise had any value in the startup world. And it wasn’t until Jessica Livingston said we need unicorns founded by women that I truly started to believe that could be me.

Perception vs Reality

My guess is that because many of us women are afraid to be too confident or to showcase our badassery, it remains invisible. I like to think of things in terms of bell curves, so here we go:

How I visualize what we pretend the startup/tech scene is like

We like to think that men and women in the space are equally talented, there just happens to be fewer women. That seems intuitively correct when you think about it.

What we act like it’s like in practice

Because women’s badass talents are often invisible and unconscious bias encourages us to underestimate them, even if they are clearly shown, too often in hiring and promotion women are treated as if they were, on average, not as good as the men.

What it’s really like, in my experience

If I have a man and woman who seem equally capable of doing a job, I perceive it as a safer bet to hire the woman because, with a little mentoring to raise her confidence and allow her to showcase her badassery with pride, she will almost always end up being more talented and capable than the man after just a few months.

There are fewer women in the space, but I find the ones who are willing to brave making a career in a hostile space are the ones who are the most talented, driven, and, most importantly, they truly love what they do. And that is how I, when trying to recruit the best of the best, ended up with an all-female team.