Can Stock Photos Help More Women Become Entrepreneurs?
How the depiction of women in entrepreneurship and business reinforces perceptions or drives change
I talk a lot about women. I don’t mean gossip, mind you. These are strategic discussions, sometimes planned, often impromptu, about how to improve the numbers and successes of women who are entrepreneurs, executives, and leaders at any level in business. I’m talking about brainstorming meetings with a wide variety of groups and individuals about the entrepreneurial ecosystem and how it has improved in terms of attracting women and other underrepresented populations to start and grow companies, and what kind of improvements it still needs.
One of the key points that has come up in many of my recent conversations about women in entrepreneurship, from my adopted hometown of Nashville to my former adopted home region of Silicon Valley, has been about growing and diversifying the representation of successful women. In practical terms, we’re usually talking about mentorship and physical visibility in business settings. If young women see successful entrepreneurs and executives they can relate to, whether that’s solely because of gender, or a combination of carriage, demeanor, attire, and so on, they will have an easier time imagining themselves in those roles.
But abstract representations matter, too. Which is why the news of Sheryl Sandberg’s LeanIn.org organization partnering with Getty Images to produce a broader (sorry for the pun) depiction of how women business leaders look, dress, and interact is so welcome, and the effort so valuable.
We have come to accept the trope of the t-shirt-and-jeans-wearing tech startup founder, but mostly when that founder is male. We see very little representation of women tech founders anyway, but when we do they’re often in special-issue glossy media roundups crying “where are the women?!” and they’re generally dressed to the nines, boardroom-style.
E.B. Boyd tackled this issue a few years ago in an article in San Francisco magazine, with a photo composite by Jen Siska showing the head of Leah Busque, founder of TaskRabbit, superimposed on Mark Zuckerberg’s hoodie-clad body.
It’s not just about attire, whether dressy or casual. If you could plot demeanor and personal style characteristics among male leaders and among female leaders on a scatter chart, they’d probably create a pretty different set. Up-and-coming women who don’t see other leaders with similar characteristics to their own, i.e. characteristics that may occur more frequently in women leaders, may find reinforcement of whatever worries they may have about stepping into leadership roles. In fact, Pew Research did a related study, and while the 2008 report is a bit dated, it shows that perceptions of men and women leaders skew quite differently and with a bias towards male leaders, but in assessing individual traits that comprise good leadership, those traits are more often ascribed to women.
It’s a complicated matter, and there isn’t a single right answer. Men and women both need to see women in a variety of business roles: leading, mentoring, starting companies, funding companies — and basically making it normal to see women in any of these roles. We aren’t there yet. And stock photos won’t get us there, but better depictions of a fuller story can’t hurt.
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Kate O’Neill, founder of KO Insights, is an author, speaker, and “tech humanist” consultant solving strategic problems in how data and technology can shape more meaningful human experiences. Her latest book is Pixels and Place: Connecting Human Experience Across Digital and Physical Spaces.
