Sharon Vosmek argues that women-only mentorship programs treat women as problems to fix rather than addressing real barriers. When an entrepreneurship program removed an on-location requirement, female applications doubled. She says systemic design changes, not separate tracks, create actual inclusion.
Chapters
The question is what I think of programs that specifically target women in tech. I hate women's leadership programs. I am so done being mentored. I am so done having women be mentored. So that's one. You know, it's just I don't need another mentor. I got plenty of advisors, thank you very much. And our women are exceptional. They don't need mentoring, they need advisors just like anyone else does. But I think often mentoring or targeted programs are used as a way to fix women, as it were, rather than address what is the issue, why aren't women there? And I'll give an example. An unnamed partner of ours was really struggling to get women into their program for entrepreneurs. So they wanted to start a separate one for women. And they came to me and said, we're going to do this separate one for women. It's going to be awesome because the women won't come to our current one. And I said, well, have you explored why they won't come to your current one? Well, no, no, no. We're going to do this one for women. It's going to be great. Women are going to show up. And so they did that and they got a few women, but not the hundreds that they usually get for men. Two years into this interesting dialogue with them, they finally taken a look at what was happening in their organization to prevent women from participating. One was that they had an on location requirement. Okay. The vast majority of women have responsibilities in addition to their work and it is very difficult to go on location anywhere, even if it's a weekend boot camp. And they redesigned their program and moved away from their three month on location requirement and boom, their female applicants doubled just by changing how they were doing their program. So things that try and fix women rather than fix the paradigm. I'm very challenged by having said that. I do love my female book club because we get together, we have a lovely glass of wine and we mentor each other through whatever hurdles we're having. But I think there are very few scenarios where a uniquely focused women's effort will get us to where we need to get. Because I actually think this is a real problem for us as a society and, and furthering it with more and more women's only programs I don't think gets us any closer to an ultimate solution. It's less comfortable. I think it is far more comfortable for women to get together and feel all woman y and we like each other and that's good. But that's the same problem that boys have when they all get together and they feel good. You know, I just think that it's time for us to get uncomfortable.
