Launching While Female
Smashing the System That Holds Women Entrepreneurs Back
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An exposé of the gender gap in entrepreneurship and a road map for a more inclusive and economically successful future for us all
Journalist and professor Susanne Althoff investigates the obstacles women and nonbinary entrepreneurs—especially those of color—face when launching, funding, and growing their companies, obstacles that persist because the current start-up world was engineered by and for white men. Through interviews with over a hundred founders across the country and in all industries, Althoff paints a picture of an entrepreneurial system rife with bias and discrimination, where women receive less than 3 percent of this country’s venture capital, struggle to find mentors in the wake of #MeToo, and are dismissed as “mompreneurs.”
The effects of this unequal system—a weaker economy, fewer jobs, less innovation—are felt by all of us, and Althoff explains how more equitable structures in business and entrepreneurship will benefit all people, not just those hoping to fund a startup.
By exploring some of the practical ways we can open the entrepreneurial system to everyone, Althoff provides a rallying cry and a way forward for women entrepreneurs and their allies, showing that change is urgent and within our reach.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Althoff, former editor-in-chief of Boston Globe Magazine, debuts with a wise collection of advice and encouragement for aspiring female entrepreneurs. Cautioning that startup founders skew overwhelmingly male, she provides hard-won advice from 100 women on overcoming systemic inequities and gaining access to venture capital. Profile subjects include lobbyist Virginia Littlejohn, who discusses how a focus on finding male allies helped secure passage of the Women's Business Ownership Act of 1988, and Heroclip CEO Mina Yoo, who bemoans how "the conversation in business settings will always come around to her kids and who's watching them" in a way that doesn't happen for her male counterparts. Sexual harassment can still be a problem for the entrepreneurs Althoff interviews, as is a lingering sense that a level of assertiveness admirable in businessmen is unseemly in businesswomen. But she offers skills designed to overcome these obstacles, such as deflecting unwanted advances and finding confidence by faking it, while celebrating the history of female entrepreneurship, from Madam C.J. Walker, a wildly successful early 20th-century provider of hair products for Black women, to today's Jessica O. Matthews, founder of the clean-energy company Uncharted Power. Althoff's incisive, practical guide should be required reading for any entrepreneurial woman.
