Breaking Out of the Entrepreneur Boys Club

It's something of a truism that there are too few females in the web startup space, and indeed, in early-stage ventures in general. But if this is commonly accepted as fact, it's only recently that there has been a big push to go out and recruit great women to the field. Today, new San Francisco-based startup incubator i/o ventures announced the first ever WIE Prize for female entrepreneurs.

The prize is offered in partnership with the WIE Network and will be awarded at the WIE Symposium in September. Basically, it will be be investment based on the i/o model: 8% of the company for $25,000, a 4-month incubation period and access to world class mentors and supporters who can help with product, model, and later-stage investment, not to mention a stint at the i/o ventures space in the best neighborhood in San Francisco, the Mission.

The prize came about when i/o noticed how few female entrepreneurs they had applying to their incubator program. Co-founder Paul Bragiel said that the purpose of featuring this spot in their portfolio as a separate prize is to publicize clearly and loudly that, not only is there room for women in the tech space, there is a significant desire to see more women-led companies.

I think that's the right attitude. The goal of any effort like this is ultimately not to end whatever discrimination may exist against women-headed companies (even if that's an intermediary goal), but to make entrepreneurship just as viable for creative, driven women, as it is for men. We want to be recruiting the best people to create the disruptive companies of the future, period.

The social entrepreneurship space is not quite as segmented when it comes to gender as the web tech space is. Indeed, one of the things this field can offer is models of powerful female entrepreneurs like Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp and One World Health founder Victoria Hale. A significant percentage of the companies I write about in these pages -- Samasource, FORGE, Global Health Corps, Global Citizen Year, Gardens for Health, to name a few -- were founded and are led by spectacularly badass women.

Promisingly, trends around the country are looking up. Statistics show consistently that women-headed companies are starting faster than their male headed counterparts, and often growing faster once they begin to achieve scale. But despite the example of successful female tech entrepreneurs like Caterina Fake (Flickr, Hunch) and Rashmi Sinha (Slideshare), the field can still feel like an old boys club.

So I'm glad to see more high profile young female entrepreneurs like Foodspotting's Soraya Darabi featured in major publications. I'm glad to see incubators like i/o and Y Combinator (who have at least two kick ass women-owned companies this cycle, inlcuding one company in stealth and one that just released its first platform -- update: there are actually at least three, including "Mint-for-business" Indinero) actively recruiting, not out of a fear of being discriminatory, but because of a desire to find the most kick ass people, no matter what their gender.

To learn more about women in technology, I highly recommend checking out Women 2.0, an organization dedicated to increasing the number of startups founded by women.

To apply for the WIE Prize, visit i/o ventures.

Photo credit: Flickr and Hunch founder Caterina Fake, by Caterina Fake