Tag Archives: Los Angeles Times
New Study Shows Women Are Taking Care of Themselves
In light of recent books about women at work, such as Own It, by
Sallie Krawcheck, there is great interest about whether women are succeeding in the job market.
A study released yesterday, published by Makeda Easter of the Los Angeles Times, shows that when women lead an organization, they provide twice as many jobs to female workers.
You can read the full article at this link:
http://www.postbulletin.com/business/tech-startups-founded-by-women-have-twice-the-number-of/article_348cf459-1520-5fc8-9391-c793af2b8c42.html
If you live in the DFW area, the article appears on page 4D of the Dallas Morning News on June 25, 2017. Here is the essence of the article:
“Startups with at least one female founder wind up building companies where nearly half the staff are women, a new study finds.
With an average of 48 percent female workers, women-led firms have nearly twice the industry average and outpace some of the nation’s largest tech companies in gender diversity including Google (31 percent), Facebook (33 percent) and Uber (36 percent), according to the study by online startup investing platform FundersClub that surveyed 85 U.S.-based tech startups.
Alex Mittal, co-founder and chief executive of FundersClub, said startups are key to addressing gender diversity in the workplace because the ones that succeed might someday be massive companies. (The majority of startups surveyed had fewer than 20 employees).
The study also examined the effect of female tech founders on leadership and engineering teams. Women made up 38 percent of executives at firms with at least one female founder — 2.4 times the average at startups with no female founders. At women-led firms, females made up 23 percent of the engineering teams — 2.3 times the average at firms led by men.
The findings come on the heels of a monthslong investigation into allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination at Uber, which has elevated awareness of what long has been one of the tech industry’s biggest deficiencies.
Mittal said the timing was simply a coincidence. Women in the industry say the survey’s findings are no surprise.
“Top female talent is more attracted to work on a team where they can see themselves in leadership and know that is respected in the company,” said KJ Erickson, the CEO of Simbi, a service exchange platform.
Natalia Oberti Noguera, founder and CEO of Pipeline Angels, a network of women investors, said the survey failed to address the elephant in the room — race.
“How many of those women founders are white women,” she asked. “It would’ve been even more exciting if this report had included race and gender together.”
She recalls attending a Los Angeles gathering for women founders that attracted more than 200 women but few of color.
“There were only two black women and maybe four Asian women, the rest of women were predominantly blonde and very attractive,” Schulte said. “This is not representative of the people that are out there.”
Diversity — gender, race, age, among others — is crucial to being competitive in the startup world, Schulte said. It “can bring a richness to problem-solving that you can’t get if you have 10 people who are clones.”
Are Colin Clark’s Books True? We Can’t Ask Marilyn!
On Friday, I saw My Week with Marilyn, starring Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monore. She was nominated for an Oscar for this performance.
The movie was based upon a book written by Colin Clark, entitled The Prince, the Showgirl and Me (St. Martins Press, 1996). The script included additional material from his follow-up book, My Week With Marilyn (Weinstein Books, 2011). That book contains gossipy, tell-all material, that was heavily relied upon in the movie.
Controversy exists about whether any of the juicy bits are even true. For example, here are two quotes that I obtained from the Los Angeles Times on December 10, 2011, in an article written by Amy Kaufman. You can read the entire article here.
“I was there every day, and I knew what was happening. [Clark] was on the set, and he was a gofer — ‘Hey, I need a cup of coffee,’ or whatever. No one regarded him as anything but a gofer,” said Amy Greene, the widow of Milton Greene, a photographer who was vice president of Monroe’s production company.
“It’s a complete lie. It’s a fantasy. He was a fourth-rate water boy,” agreed Greene’s son, Joshua, who handles his father’s archives. He said he contacted BBC Films, the production company, to offer up his father’s documents and photographs before production on “My Week With Marilyn” began, but his inquiry was ignored.
I didn’t think the movie was that great. And, honestly, I don’t really care if it was true. How many more revelations will we find about a woman who died in 1962? And about JFK, who died in 1963? It seems to me that the number of Monroe and JFK accounts must run neck-in-neck, and some people claim that they did more than necking. It all depends on who you read.
But, I thought that Williams was great. She was nominated last year for Blue Valentine, and before that, was wonderful in Incendiary, which was just another average movie.
Perhaps in the future she will find a script that matches her talent, and she will receive recognition as the quality actress that she is.
What did you think? Do you care that this account is true?
Let’s talk about it really soon!
