A decade ago, a polling firm asked British workers to cast their vote for the most annoying example of business jargon. “Thinking outside the box” topped the list, narrowly edging out “touch base”. In periodic surveys since then, “outside the box” has repeated its dismal performance.
If you are tired of that phrase too, then perhaps you’ll be relieved to hear that I don’t plan to use it here. My manifesto to make the world think more innovatively has nothing to do with where that thinking is being done and everything to do with who is doing the thinking.
It starts with venture capital, an industry with an outsized influence over who will be the leaders of tomorrow and who will be left behind. If you have a smart idea that you want to turn into a successful business, it helps to have venture-capital funding. However, if you want to obtain that funding, the data suggests it helps to be a man.
In 2017, only two per cent of venture capital funding in the US went to startups founded by women. Only one tenth of that, a miniscule 0.2 per cent, went to black women. By expecting successful entrepreneurs to fit only one mould – white, male and nerdy – the venture-capital industry is actually constraining entrepreneurship. I know we can break that mould – and that by doing so we will unlock unprecedented innovation.
Venture capitalists, who are 82 per cent male and 70 per cent white, can lead the way by diversifying their own ranks. VCs from more diverse backgrounds are more likely to invest in a more diverse array of founders. When Arlan Hamilton, who runs the VC firm Backstage Capital, started a new fund to invest in black women founders, she tweeted “They’re calling it a ‘diversity’ fund. I’m calling it an IT’S ABOUT DAMN TIME fund.”
VC can also change other things about the way it does business. Kathryn Minshew, founder and CEO of career-development platform, The Muse, suggests that funds “commit to treating harassment and discrimination against female founders with the same legal protections as harassment and discrimination against employees”. Theresia Gouw and Jennifer Fonstad, founding partners of Aspect Ventures, are applying a traditional scientific method to their firm’s diversity efforts, “actively hypothesising, testing those hypotheses and re-analysing data on a continuous loop.”
For a long time, venture capital has been an industry that funnels money from white men to white men. Once it changes that, it will be ready for the future.
But it doesn’t do any good for funders to change the way they look for ideas unless we also broaden the community of people who get the chance to put ideas forward.
One way to do this is to bring more women and people of colour into the sector that produces so many of today’s startup businesses: technology. In the UK, girls are ten times less likely to study computer science at A level than boys. In the US, women make up just 19 per cent of computer and information-sciences degrees. That number is down from a high of 37 per cent in 1985, in part because biased media portrayals of computing and the male-dominated subculture of gaming have come together to make anyone who isn’t a brogrammer feel unwelcome in the field.
So how do we get more girls and people of colour into the pipeline?
One way would be to think of it not as a pipeline – which has just one entrance – but as a system of pathways, that offers different entrances to different people. In the US we have organisations for students, such as Girls Who Code and Black Girls Code, while in the UK there is Code First: Girls, each aiming to show young girls that they have a seat at the keyboard. I’m involved in a coalition called Reboot Representation, which has coalesced a number of leading tech companies around the goal of doubling the number of underrepresented women of colour graduating with degrees in computer science by 2025.
In the UK, computer scientist and technology evangelist Sue Black has founded #techmums – inspired by her own experience, it provides computer training for mothers seeking to learn new skills or simply understand what their children are doing. It's a great example of what creative thinking in this area can do. Its goal is to reach a million mothers by 2020, so they can thrive at work, change jobs if they want to and nurture their children’s interest in technology. Those who go on to start their own tech companies, meanwhile, can turn to the workshops, developmental support and mentorship offered by organisations such as Laura Stebbing and Poppy Gaye's accelerateHER.
Tech entrepreneurship has the potential to revolutionise society – but not until we revolutionise tech entrepreneurship itself. That requires making room for the innovators who have been systematically excluded from the startup world.
It’s up to them whether they get their ideas outside a box, touching a base or somewhere else. But wherever these innovators are – and more importantly, whoever they are – I want them to have an equal opportunity to use those ideas to make the world better for all of us.
Melinda Gates is co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
