Gender Diversity in Tech (or lack thereof)

Why aren’t more women represented in the tech industry? It’s one of the major questions tackled by venture firm First Round in its recently released  “State of Startups” report. Included in their findings were some revealing statistics:

• 61% of companies are either all-male or mostly-male.

• 61% of the organizations’ boards of directors are entirely male.

One of the biggest concerns from the report for me was highlighted in a recent Business Insider article. There is a major divergence of opinion between the sexes on the root of the cause for the lack of female representation in the tech industry.

Nearly half of all men surveyed pointed tot he classic pipeline excuse: there simply aren’t as many women or members of certain minorities qualified to the jobs tech companies need done.

Women had a very different take on the matter:

Women [] attributed the industry’s diversity problem to unconscious bias in hiring or promotions, followed by a lack of female role models in the industry.

The difference in opinion is especially alarming when paired with First Round’s findings that “nearly 1 in 4 of the startups surveyed had no plans to promote diversity and inclusion” and “30% of startups [ ] hadn’t talked about diversity and inclusion inside their company.”

These are conversations that we need to be having. What will you do to begin to bridge the gap?