{"id":27242,"date":"2017-06-09T13:35:08","date_gmt":"2017-06-09T17:35:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wework.com\/creator\/creator\/?p=27242"},"modified":"2020-02-26T14:32:26","modified_gmt":"2020-02-26T19:32:26","slug":"two-geek-girls-discover-the-sisterhood-shaking-up-tech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wework.com\/ideas\/community-stories\/two-geek-girls-discover-the-sisterhood-shaking-up-tech","title":{"rendered":"Two ‘Geek Girls’ discover the sisterhood shaking up tech"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Their young daughters are obsessed with technology, messaging their friends, and games like Minecraft, which made journalists Heather Cabot and Samantha Walravens curious: with so many girls into tech, why was the number of women working in the field steadily declining?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cabot and Walravens, working respectively on the East and West coasts, started collecting stories and comparing notes of women in Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe come at it from different points of view,\u201d says Walravens, a veteran journalist who reported on the rise and fall of the dot-com boom for PCWorld<\/em> magazine from San Francisco.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, back in New York City, Cabot was reporting on women in the tech sector for Yahoo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ve was working on something very similar,\u201d says Cabot. \u201cMy beat was to cover how the internet was changing. I was meeting a lot of women starting companies and was wondering: What is it about these women that enabled them to persist in this male dominated field?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Walravens says even before Ellen Pao\u2019s headline-grabbing gender discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins<\/a>, it was clear Silicon Valley had a big problem with sexism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBack in 2013, I was having lunch with friend who said: \u2018You\u2019re not going to be believe it, but I was told I\u2019m too aggressive and wear too much lipstick,\u2019\u201d Walravens recounts. That friend wanted her to write about the sexism in Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Walravens reached out to a number of women in the tech field she discovered that yes, there was indeed sexism and bias. But she also discovered a different story: There was a powerful grassroots movement of female entrepreneurs, innovators, and creators within the digital revolution who were succeeding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI wanted to take a more positive perspective and tell their<\/em> story,\u201d Walravens says. As did Cabot. So the two decided to team up, and after five years of research, the result is the new book Geek Girl Rising: Inside the Sisterhood Shaking Up Tech.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, what\u2019s the secret sauce that sets these women apart?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey were passionate about solving problems,\u201d explains Cabot. \u201cAs an entrepreneur, that\u2019s important. Second, they were fearless.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They also couldn\u2019t imagine doing anything else. Many had been encouraged to start tinkering at a young age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAll of the women we spoke with were encouraged to take risks as girls, and take on projects,\u201d adds Walravens. \u201cFor example, one woman, Madison Maxey, founder of Loomia<\/a>, a company that creates smart fabrics, used to work on projects with her dad, who taught her how to solder.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another common trait: many of the female software developers had parents who were entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Others, like Kay Koplovitz, the cofounder and managing partner Springboard Growth Capital<\/a>, were able to succeed by embracing uncertainty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cabot says the tech field is all about \u201citerating,\u201d and getting an idea out, even if it\u2019s not perfect. For women, who are taught to aim for perfection, this can sometimes be challenging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne of the greatest takeaways we learned is just do it,\u201d Cabot says. \u201cSo many people told us it\u2019s really the idea of just starting. It goes back to this idea about perfection. It takes a lot of courage to get down the bones. You have to be comfortable with feedback and iterating.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe dirty secret is that it can be really lonely being an entrepreneur,\u201d adds Walravens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFind your posse and a cofounder, you don\u2019t need to do it alone.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps the biggest challenge women entrepreneurs face is raising money. The Geek Girl Rising<\/em> authors found many of the tech women they interviewed for the book are busy building their own funding networks. They found women were actually very supportive of other women in tech, and were trading intelligence on how and where to pitch to get funding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey are really trying to pay it forward,\u201d says Walravens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Their young daughters are obsessed with technology, messaging their friends, and games like Minecraft, which made journalists Heather Cabot and Samantha Walravens curious: with so many girls into tech, why was the number of women working in the field steadily declining? Cabot and Walravens, working respectively on the East and West coasts, started collecting stories […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":897,"featured_media":27244,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43903],"tags":[513,39218,39221],"class_list":["post-27242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-community-stories","tag-innovation","tag-small-businesses","tag-entrepreneurs"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nTwo 'Geek Girls' discover the sisterhood shaking up tech<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Their young daughters are obsessed with technology, messaging their friends, and games like Minecraft, which made journalists Hea\u2026\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link 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