High-tech female entrepreneurs - Where are they?
Where are the female entrepreneurs?
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Editor’s note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic.This is the first of two articles he has written about the lack of female entrepreneurs. The second article will be published Thursday. Wadhwae is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.
By Vivek Wadhwa, special to LTW
DURHAM, N.C. - I'll bet that if Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs had even one woman on his executive team, the iPad would have been given a different name.
Otherwise why would Apple give its new device a name half of the population equates with feminine hygiene?
Apple isn't the only company with a male-dominated executive team. No woman has ever been CEO of a Wall Street firm. Women were primary owners of only 19% of the 237,843 firms founded in 2004, according to the Kauffman Foundation's analysis of Dun & Bradstreet data.
And only 3% of tech firms were founded by women in that year.
"Women are under-represented in all aspects of information technology, and IT entrepreneurship is no exception," says Lucinda M. Sanders, CEO of the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT). Women are "almost absent in high-level technology positions," such as chief technology officer and vice-president of research and development, Sanders says.
Women hold less than 5% of all IT patents and contribute less than 1.2% of open-source software, she says.
(For the complete Business Week column, click here.)
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Copyright 2012 WRAL Tech Wire. All rights reserved.
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