Ignite and Female Founders
Disclaimer: I want to say, straight up, that this isn’t going to be a blog post arguing why we need more women in tech. People far more eloquent and well-researched than me have written multiple blog posts and articles on the subject. I’m going to assume we’re all on the same page here: having more gender diversity in tech is A Good Thing.
Instead, this post is about a far more specific issue: increasing the number of female founders on our accelerator cohorts.
Please note that within this post I am making broad generalisations. I’m more than happy to get into longer and more precise discussions if you want to get in touch.
The problem
I’ve been at Ignite almost a year now. My introduction to the world of tech has been incredible, involving a dizzyingly steep learning curve and a whole new contact list of amazing, driven people.
In that time I have seen three cohorts come through Ignite’s accelerator programme. We’ve had a tremendous variety of companies and people — founders, employees, technical, non-technical, B2B, B2C.
But there’s one feature of all the programmes that has been bothering me.
In our Newcastle cohort we had two women. In our London cohort, numbers improved — we had eight. In our current Manchester cohort we are back down to three. Even in the London programme there was still a lack of female founders; only three out of more than twenty on the programme in total.
Quite simply: I want to see more women coming through our programme, in particular more female founders.
Former Ignite CEO Paul Smith started momentum last year alongside our London programme, using session facilitators from the programme to deliver extra workshops for female founders.
I’m keen to continue something in this vein, but I want to find out what will be useful; what areas we can work on that will make the most difference to our application rates and engagement from female founders. I’ve thought about a couple of areas:
- For our most recent programme in Manchester, we had applications from female founders with strong personalities and business propositions who didn’t have any technical capability. At Ignite our selection criteria is quite strict: we need someone on the team to have this capability in order to get the most out of the very iterative, fast-paced programmes that we run. Is there some way to empower female founders to either find a technical co-founder or develop technical skills in a way that will help them towards an MVP (i.e. a different kind of technical training than learning to code from scratch as many bootcamps do). Would this be useful?
- Bright, driven women that I speak to don’t seem to think of themselves as someone who could ‘start’ something. They (often) don’t see starting a business as a mechanism for solving the problems they find in the world. Whilst I don’t believe that every single person should run out and build a startup for the sake of it, I do think that female founders represent a relatively untapped resource. And it has something to do with confidence, in a complex and deep-rooted way. I want to work to change this. One of the things I love about Ignite is that it is a vehicle to help people to break into the world of business. We provide workspace, contacts, coaching, accountability and money to help people embark on the journey of building a business. And I want us to help more female founders do this. How can we effectively work to change this perception in intelligent, ambitious women that starting a tech company is not for them?
What next?
Short term: I’d like to get applications from female founders up for our London programme (starting in September). London Programme Director Martyn Davies and I will be holding some office hours specifically for female founders thinking about applying. These will be on July 20th and July 28th, from 5pm-8pm, and you can sign up here.
Long term: There’s no quick fix to this. Tell me what I can do that will be helpful. I have a few ideas for things we can work on over the next few months, but I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. Are you involved in organisations that support female entrepreneurs, founders and coders? How can Ignite help? How can I help? I’m very open to partnerships and collaborations. Do you know anyone working in this area who’d be interested in getting in touch? Share this with them.
Get in touch with me at flossie@ignite.io. Sign up for our female founder office hours here.
Please also get in touch if you are a female founder considering an application for the London programme (starting Autumn 2016).
