What are the top traits of entrepreneurs? Passion. Determination. Vision. Resilience. Self-belief. Flexibility. Rule-breaking. Risk-taking. Ability to sell. However, if you look at those traits, they are all more commonly associated with men. Campaigns like #ILookLikeAnEngineer are aimed at challenging these stereotypes. However, along with other people’s stereotypes, a source of bias is our own perception of our selves.
So, I have a possible solution as to how to get more women into careers in technology and entrepreneurship that came to me from my own experience of starting a tech company. Getting past self-perception.
In 2010, I was an ecstatically-happy first-year student at HBS. I had pitched myself to the admissions committee as a life science / technology entrepreneur in the making and it had worked! I was over the moon.
As an aspiring entrepreneur, however, I was female, 38 and a single mom. By all outward appearances, I did not fit the mold of the 21st century entrepreneur that is predominantly male, young and unencumbered by childcare. I imagined it akin to what Spud Webb or Jeremy Lin felt when shooting for the NBA. It brought up self-doubt. I thought I had it in me but was I right?
In my moments of self-doubt, I sought data points to assure myself that I was making the right career choice. I took career aptitude tests. They matched me with positions I didn’t really aspire to, such as public relations, and my top career choice, entrepreneurship, was a middling 50% fit. Really?
My scientist brain couldn’t help but notice that all these career instruments are based on answering questions about one’s self. In the lab, we distrust self-report measures because they are notorious for introducing self-report bias. In other words, what you think of yourself will affect the answers you give. That might sound obvious and trivial, but in the world of career choice, such self-report bias could contribute to the pipeline problem.
So much of what we think of ourselves is based on parental and societal expectations and vantage points. Gender, race and socioeconomic background all bias our self-perception. It is an echo chamber from which we have a hard time escaping. So, I questioned whether I had biased my own results with my own unconscious gender-based preconceptions.
I am also stubborn as a mule, love a challenge and think ambition is a good quality in all people, including women and small children! So I threw caution and career assessment to the wind and went to intern at a tech startup in NYC. I loved it. I found an amazing female technical co-founder who had the same risk tolerance (or low boredom threshold) as I did. We came up with an idea that had legs. Companies paid us for our product. We convinced others that we were fundable and joinable. And the rest is history. We are the 3% of VC backed startups with a female founded team.
Not everyone is aware of these self-perception problems, however. They are more trusting of established practices. However, they, like me, can easily be limited in their career choice by their own self-perception, as well as external perceptions.
While we have made strides in balancing gender, ethnic and socioeconomic status in the educational system, we have yet to propagate this forward into the world of career choice. Other very important issues aside from bias contribute to the problem: balancing work and family in the case of gender balance and equal access to opportunity in the cases of socioeconomic status.
However, if we start with the beginning of the process for most people – a high school or college student wondering “what should I do when I grow up?” –a non-biased way to assess career aptitude would be a very powerful way of affecting change in the career search process. We need to take the bias that exists in the eyes of the career seeker out of the equation.
I say this now, 5 years later, having created the pymetrics career platform that I wished I had at HBS – a tool that assesses people’s traits objectively through performance on scientific exercises rather than through asking them questions. It is an obvious transition. To determine a person’s weight, a doctor doesn’t ask them how much they weigh. He/she puts that person on the scale. What we need (and have developed at pymetrics) is a scale for people’s traits. We are not the only ones to be moving in this direction. Knack, Assessment Innovation and other performance-based platforms all work to eliminate self-report and therefore self-perception bias.
And the epilogue to this story is that, using objective measures, we have eliminated much of the self-perception bias that exists in career recommendation. Men and women, as well as people of all ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, are equally recommended for careers that are currently non-diverse. And on a personal note, entrepreneurship is one of my top career matches. Good thing.. or I’d have to reconsider everything all over again….
Finally, I was fortunate that many other women have similarly managed to overcome their self-perception biases and HBS has turned out a disproportionate amount of female founders. #ILookLikeAnEntrepreneur
