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Paul Solman: Silicon Valley entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa is a 
widely heard voice on the value of immigration for the U.S. 
economy. We first featured him a year ago in "Man v. Machine," a 
story on the automation of work and did so again on this page 
last fall on the threat posed by a programmable robot named 
Baxter.

An immigrant himself (from India), Wadhwa used to think Silicon 
Valley was a a paragon of open access: talent like his would 
inevitably prevail. But he has been writing and speaking lately 
about the Valley's "myth of meritocracy." All, he realized, was 
not as it seemed, and he followed up his dawning disillusionment 
with research, which he will publish soon. But his findings 
seemed so noteworthy, I asked if he would share them with us at 
the NewsHour. And so he has.

Vivek Wadhwa: Visit any company in the Valley, and you'll see 
that it resembles the United Nations. At the Google cafeteria, 
they always serve Indian, Chinese and Mexican food; hamburgers 
and hot dogs are nowhere to be found. Indeed, my research team 
documented that 52 percent of startups in Silicon Valley during 
the recent tech boom were founded by immigrants -- like me. So I 
used to call Silicon Valley the world's greatest meritocracy.

This was before I moved to the Valley and my wife pointed out 
something strange: that practically all of the people at Silicon 
Valley's big networking events were male. They were mostly 
white, Indian, or Chinese. Women, blacks and Hispanics were 
nowhere to be found. When I analyzed company founder data from 
the Kauffman Foundation, I was shocked to learn that only 3 
percent of the tech firms were founded by women. When I looked 
at the executive teams of the Valley's top tech firms, with a 
couple of notable exceptions, I couldn't find any women 
technology heads. Even the management team of Apple didn't have 
a single woman in it. And I learned that virtually all of 
Silicon Valley's venture-capital firms are male dominated -- the 
few women whom you find there are in either marketing or human 
resources. Indeed, of the 89 venture capitalists on the 2009 
TheFunded list of top venture capitalists, only one was a woman.

So I was wrong; this is no meritocracy.

Since then, I have researched this topic in greater depth. When 
I analyzed data from my own studies on entrepreneurship, I was 
surprised to learn that there is virtually no difference in 
motivation between men and women entrepreneurs. Women start 
companies for the same reasons as men: because they want to 
build wealth and capitalize on business ideas, like the startup-
company culture and are tired of working for others. Women 
entrepreneurs are as highly educated as their male counterparts, 
have the same early interest in starting their own business and 
learn the same valuable lessons from their work experience and 
from prior successes and failures.

This raised the question: Are women less competent as 
entrepreneurs than men? Are they not cut out for the rough-and-
tumble world of entrepreneurship? The answer turned out to be 
none of this. An analysis performed by the Kauffman Foundation 
showed that women are more capital-efficient than men. Babson 
College's Global Entrepreneurship Monitor found that women-led 
high-tech startups have lower failure rates than those led by 
men. Other research has shown that venture-backed companies run 
by women have annual revenues 12 percent higher than those by 
men and organizations that are the most inclusive of women in 
top management positions achieve a 35 percent higher return on 
equity and 34 percent higher total return to shareholders.

Could the education of women be the problem? Not according to 
data from the National Science Foundation. Girls now match boys 
in mathematical achievement. In the U.S., 140 women enroll in 
higher education for every 100 men who do. Women earn more than 
50 percent of all bachelor's and master's degrees, and nearly 50 
percent of all doctorates. Women participation in business and 
MBA programs has grown more than five-fold since the 1970s, and 
the increase in the number of engineering degrees granted to 
women is almost tenfold.

This shows that there isn't a fundamental problem, and that 
things are moving in the right direction. I have also 
interviewed about 300 women in tech over the past three years, 
and my research team at Stanford University recently completed a 
survey of more than 500 women founders. We are still analyzing 
the complex findings (and will likely publish a paper in the 
summer). At a glance, though, the new research shows a distinct 
change in attitudes over time. Women are becoming more confident 
and assertive, and they are helping each other. Men are also 
beginning to mentor and coach women.

That's not all. Many technologies are now advancing 
exponentially. We all know how computing is advancing -- our 
computers get more powerful every year as prices drop. The same 
is happening in fields such as robotics, artificial 
intelligence, 3D printing, nanomaterials, medicine, and 
synthetic biology. This is making it possible for small teams to 
do what was once possible only for governments and large 
corporations to do: solve big problems. Starting exponential 
companies requires relatively small amounts of money, and 
entrepreneurs with cross-disciplinary knowledge and skills have 
the advantage. This plays to the strengths of women: they are in 
the catbird seat for the new era of innovation.

To encourage, inspire and educate women to become engineers, 
scientists and entrepreneurs -- and help solve humanity's grand 
challenges, I am myself taking advantage of an exponential 
technology: crowdsourcing. I plan to harness the genius of the 
crowd to produce a book about women at the frontier of 
technology. Along with journalist and author Farai Chediya and 
my lead researcher Neesha Bapat, we are planning to ask hundreds 
-- possibly thousands -- of women to co-author this book with 
us. We will presell the book on a crowdfunding site such as 
Indiegogo and donate all of the profits to fund the tuition of 
women through the Graduate Studies Program at Singularity 
University and to support women-led startups coming out of this 
program. This is a 10-week program designed for leaders who want 
to build innovative solutions to global grand challenges.

So Silicon Valley may not have been the perfect meritocracy, but 
there is hope that it will soon be, and that our women may save 
the world.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/03/silicon-valley-
discriminates-against-women-even-if-theyre-better.html

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