Female Founder Spotlight: Rhona Togher of Restored Hearing

It’s great to have many talented female founders in our network at SOSV. In business worldwide, women unfortunately make up a significantly smaller percentage of top-level positions. To encourage those who might be on the fence, we want share some stories from our diverse female founders.

Let’s head to Ireland to put the spotlight on Rhona Togher, who is working to help the estimated 300 million people worldwide suffering from ringing in their ears, a condition known as tinnitus.

In high school, Rhona helped develop a sound therapy for people with chronic tinnitus. She took it to a science fair and received an outpouring of public interest. While only eighteen years old, she co-founded her company Restored Hearing, and over the past six years has built a clinical trial, and thousands of users and followers. In addition to that, she used her physics background to help prevent the most common cause of tinnitus: overexposure to noise. She helped create a new mud-like material that absorbs sound eight times better than foam, for the same price. Rhona is truly making waves, and we wanted to know how being a woman has impacted her career.

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Being a female founder, have you faced any specific challenges?

R: Yeah. I think “challenges” isn’t probably a strong enough word. My co-founder is also a lady — she’s fabulous, and I wouldn’t do this without her. But it definitely is really hard. There’s the generic things, like people not thinking you’re capable of doing your job when you show up to work without makeup or your hair done. People will say things like that to you. At pitches, I’ve had people tell me my skirt is too short, and that I need to dress more appropriately for my job, as in: wear pants and carry a briefcase. But people really don’t think you’re as capable, just because you’re a lady. And we’re young ladies, you know. I’m on sabbatical from college, technically dropped out, but I’ll still go back someday and get my physics degree. Since I do not have a degree, I’ve never worked in business, and I’m twenty four, people can look at me and kind of go, “Really?” — and I’m like, “Yeah!”.

Bill Liao from SOSV is a bundle of sunshine, and he’s really “pro” the ladies. But I don’t really know many other people who are. A lot of the women that I’ve actually met in business almost seem to make you work harder for it, because they’re like, “Well you need to be able for this badass man environment,” which is nonsense. Something that I try to do, and so does Eimear, my co-founder, is work a lot with younger women, and younger people in general, to say, “We can do it, anyone can do it.” So something that I’m trying to work on here in Ireland at the moment is getting senior female executives to mentor people like us who are just past idea stage, who are trying to grow a bigger business. But they’re actually impossible to find, because either they don’t want to help or work with you, or don’t know you need them. You just feel very much so like an island as a young female entrepreneur, I’ve found. And speaking with the very few others who are here, I think they feel the same. It’s a very strange position to be in, an entrepreneur in science who is a lady.

I know a lot of male founders, who are in their late twenties running generic tech startups with ten people on their board. I have none. Most advisors are older men who see themselves in these younger guys, but they don’t see themselves in me. So that’s definitely another struggle of actually getting advisors on the board, and that’s our big push right now.

Which women have had the biggest impact on your life and career?

R: I want to say Eimear, my co-founder. Most people are like, “Oh, Michelle Obama” or “Sheryl Sandberg.” And I’m like “Eh, I haven’t read their book.” Don’t have the time! Eimear is the same age as me, and we were not really friends in school until we were about fifteen or sixteen. I knew she was also kind of a geek. I wanted to build a robot, and program it to dance. You needed a buddy to do it, and I was like, “She’s probably into this stuff too, I’ll ask her.” When she said yes to doing that, it completely changed our future. She was going to be a lawyer, and I was going to be a teacher or something. We met and we discovered science, and we’ve just bounced off each other ever since in this really amazing, beautiful way. It’s like loving nerdy science to becoming businesswomen.

What advice do you have for women who are just entering the business world?

R: I would say, find a buddy and find a mentor. Also that: “You can do it”. Every day we are told that we can’t do it by a hundred different people, because it’s not what’s happened in the past. But we absolutely can, and there is nothing to stop it. I can do it, anyone can do it. And if you want my help, I will give it to you.

Follow Rhona on Twitter: @rhonatogher, @RestoredHearing.

Originally published at sosv.com on August 7, 2015.