Last night I spoke about the gender equality edge here in Boston at an event hosted by JLL and the New England Venture Capital Association about “Life on the Edge.”

In Boston, we are sitting on the sharp edge of gender equality. Seven years ago when I started my company InkHouse with my business partner, Meg O’Leary, I didn’t think we were successful in spite of being women. But we were and we are.

I was shocked this week to discover that we are part of a 2% club. Just 2% of women-founded companies reach $1M in revenue (read more about this very important finding in Morra Aarons-Mele’s insightful piece for Harvard Business Review). For comparison, an AMEX study in 2012 found that 5.3% of all US firms reach the $1M revenue mark.

Last night I asked the audience to think of a few successful female startup CEOs in Boston. When I did this on the fly myself, I came up with Diane Hessan of Communispace, Gail Goodman of Constant Contact and Helen Greiner of iRobot, and Robin Chase of Zipcar (there are actually 75 VC or seed backed women in Boston right now according to the NEVCA’s data from 2013).

Naming women CEOs in Boston is a hard game though:

• Just 4.2% of VC funding goes to women (Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research).
• Women hold only 4.2 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions (Catalyst).

We have not come a very long way. It’s been 13 years since I was responsible for a CEO summit to which spouses were invited. We were in the throes of planning the sessions and activities when we discovered that all of the spouses were women. So we ended up planning wives events like golf clinics and spa treatments while the men spent their days thinking. I like spa treatments as much as the next woman (or man!), but that event would look almost identical if it happened today.

The future is demanding us to change and millennials are bringing it with them into the workplace. Women already outnumber men in U.S. colleges and a Bentley University study revealed that business leaders view women as better suited for success when it comes to skills.

While the gender equality issue is certainly about fairness, it’s also about performance. In The Confidence Code, Katty Kay and Claire Shipman wrote that, “Half a dozen global studies, conducted by the likes of Goldman Sachs and Columbia University, have found that companies employing women in large numbers outperform their competitors on every measure of profitability.”

Yet, women aren’t making it into leadership roles. I sometimes joke at InkHouse that we have affirmative action for men because PR is dominated by women (a number attributed to Syracuse University puts it at 85 percent). Yet, upper management is still the domain of men (80 percent).

Why?

We have a problem of what I’ve heard Victoria Budson, executive director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School, call an “unintentional bias” toward the norm. Men and women are unintentionally biased toward the person who usually does the job. For fun (or for horror), you can take Harvard’s online tests to asset your own implicit bias here.

We have to shake up these norms if women are going to lead. And in Boston, I’m encouraged to report that we’re on the leading edge of this change.

• Politicians are effecting change. This month, Mayor Walsh created the first Office on Women’s Advancement. Governor Patrick established the Women in the Workplace initiative in March (I am an appointee to the task force), which is led by Secretary of Labor and Workforce Development Rachel Kaprielian. We’re trying to create more equity for women so that they can opt in, stay in, break into executive levels, and participate on corporate boards.
• Boston employers are working to close the pay gap. Nationwide, women earn 77 cents for every man’s dollar and in Massachusetts, we beat that by two cents. Leaders like BJ’s, Hill Holiday, National Grid, State Street, and dozens more have signed the City’s compact for pay equity.
• Fortune 1000 Companies are Including more Women on their Boards. There is good and bad news for Boston regarding corporate boards. Massachusetts Fortune 1000 companies lead California’s. But only a little over a third can claim a board that is 20% female (Women on Boards 20/20).

Sheryl Sandberg deserves thanks for getting the discussion going with Lean In, and although many debate the merits of banning the word “bossy,” it has us talking about the things that hold girls back from raising their hands. But there is more work to be done to build a future in which our daughters expect to look up and see women just like them in positions of leadership.

A big thank you to C.A. Webb and Bryan Sparkes for organizing last night’s event and inviting me to be there. I have a fairly high horse, and once in a while it likes to go out for a ride.