The creation of this list is evidence that women are not accepted into entrepreneurial enterprises as well as men are yet. There shouldn't need to be a list of female founders to single them out.
It is a site for/about women founders. The fact that they made a list of successful women isn't really evidence of anything. If it was a site about founders from the east coast we could just as likely see such a list without assuming people from the east coast are not accepted into entrepreneurial enterprises.
I think he means the fact that we don't go around making lists of "Male founder successes," but we do for female founders is indicative of the imbalance between male and female startup founders, because of the emphasis it places on females.
Perhaps the list itself isn't indicative of anything, but the site and the list combined might be. There has to be a reason why it's a site for women, especially since we don't have sites for startups explicitly for men. That reason is probably because of our patriarchal society more than anything, but his implication that perhaps it indicates that the male to female founder ratio is a little lopsided is not invalid.
I don't think it necessarily means women are not accepted into entrepreneurial enterprises, because it could also mean that women simply are less interested.
I'd rather see more efforts to bring women into the top of the startup funnel, vs. singling them out later on if they become successful.
There is some value in having good examples of successful women in entrepreneurship in convincing more women that they should consider it, but I think "this person in my graduate department launched a startup" is probably more significant (regardless of gender) than "a famous woman startup founder and CEO exits, although I've never met her".
women 2.0 actually does a pretty good job with other programs to try to bring qualified women into the startup world (partnership with Founder Institute, various meetups, etc.). I think the most valuable thing would be attracting more women into college entrepreneurship clubs, entrepreneurial classes in undergraduate and MBA programs, and in non-startups, encouraging them to take responsibility to project/product management on products which may become spinouts or startups.
Given that the majority of them are coming from technical/web startups, you're going to see a huge number of technical founders. Five years ago, when I graduated in CS at a major American research institution, you could throw a dart at a map of Asia and be guaranteed to hit a country that had contributed more female engineers to my CS department than there were female white engineers in the class. Five years later, guess who went on to become technical founders?
If you want to phrase things in the positive sense, you might phrase it not as "What does CS do wrong?" but "What does environmental engineering or biomedical engineering do right?", since they got most of the women in the engineering school. I have the heretical impulse to say "Offer obvious opportunities to have a career primarily revolving around interacting with human beings" but I have learned that "Maybe they just don't want to spent 14 hours a day reading XML files" costs me friends.
I've seen a mailing list discussion between female engineers on this topic.
One intriguing idea they put forward is that in developing countries, in the last few decades, kids did not have access to home computers or console devices. You only got significant amounts of time with a computer once you had reached university. So everybody in a CS program, male and female, was starting from zero, as near-adults.
So the Asian universities did not have any toxically geeky culture, and they also had to get really good at teaching complete newbies. In this atmosphere women did as well as men.
It was suggested that Western CS departments are dominated by people from the gamer scene, who are almost all male. They are very familiar with the technology already, and skew the academic culture in such a way that interested newcomers are less welcome, and less able to keep up.
White american women are more likely to be homemakers or only work part-time than women of other ethnicities because they are more likely be married to white men who make enough money to support a family on their own. So I think there is probably some correlation between white male dominance in the workforce/salary-wise and white female absence from the work force. (I'm a former homemaker and white female. I am currently working due to having gotten divorced.)
Sexism exists so long as people keep tallies -- same with racism. They have new life breathed into them whenever anyone interposes the racial and gender lens between themselves and all they observe. Sigh. Here's to another year of counting (and then of course judging) based on race and gender. Ah, such progress.
