Economic Woman

This blows my mind. It’s from the Interesting Statistics page over at Women Don’t Ask, which I posted about a few days ago.

Women own about 40 percent of all businesses in the U.S. but receive only 2.3 percent of the available equity capital needed for growth. Male-owned companies receive the other 97.7. percent.

I would guess that a small number of male-owned companies get the vast majority of that capital. I’ll probably do some more reading and make a longer post about what is behind this, but in the meantime I’d love to hear your theories in comments.

As you might have gathered already, I think bloggers restrict ourselves unnecessarily by only linking to recent material. Most good sites and articles aren’t obsolete within a couple weeks.

Jason Kottke pointed me towards this NYT Magazine article from 2003, about Amy Smith, an inventor who teaches at MIT and develops cheap, low-tech solutions for the developing world.

Success in the kind of design that Smith pursues requires humility, because your masterpiece may end up looking like a bunch of rocks or a pile of sand. [...] Women have the advantage here, unlike other branches of engineering. ”I know how to be self-deprecating,” Smith says. ”The traditional male engineer is not taught that way.”

I’m not sure this is true – I don’t think men lack humility as a rule, or at least I don’t see how a woman educated along with them would develop fundamentally different values. I’m also not sure about the implication that women are disadvantaged in other branches of engineering. They’re not present in large numbers, but that’s not necessarily because of a lack of ability. In any case, I enjoyed the article. It’s nice reading about women in unconventional fields, and about the roundabout ways that people find the jobs they love.