Once I came home in the middle of the night from waitressing to find my mother in the kitchen, frantically frying meat surrounded by kitchen chaos. It was Christmas Eve—not celebrated in the Netherlands, but a preparation day.
We looked at each other and started laughing really loud, the kind of laughter that makes you pee in your pants. Seeing the scene from the outside, the absurdity of how it looked was striking. It was past 01:30… She was frying a roulade.
It wasn't Pippi Longstocking funny, no, no, it was the kind of realization that opens a whole palette of things, revealing a more painful side to the scene. She was there by herself, alone in the night, and preparing.
The kitchen scene was not from the 50s, a generation earlier; this was probably in 2003.
Why, when reading about the lack of funding for female founders, do I think of this scene? The numbers do not lie; resources flow predominantly to men, as evidenced by the number of VC fundings for all-female founding teams (2.3% source Harvard).
Overloaded with responsibilities, women can see problems that are vastly shared and yet overlooked. Not merely in the realm of famous home inventions like the dishwasher or rollator, initiated by a woman—read “Mother of Invention” by #KatrineMarçal .
Clearly the systems aren’t designed for women; they have a higher chance of dying in car accidents due to maladjusted safety measures, and medicine can be harmful, strokes go unrecognized. Women are basically an atypical case in the medical world, an obstruction between the baby and the world, a body prone to public opinion.
Despite growing awareness about the change necessary there’s a gap so big you can hardly see the other side.
(Off topic but inspiring: see #SarahWimmercrantz's beautiful clip where she’s celebrating the beginning of the end of greenwashing, while she's breastfeeding her baby https://lnkd.in/dnC8AHCz ).
The low numbers of funding spent on women seem to show a form of mindless rejection of female founders’ ideas... doors not opening in the first place.
What does it mean for a female-founded company to be a VC case? Multi-billion-dollar growth potential, 10x, really that's it? Not many Swedish businesses hit that target. How about a big market, solid growth potential, innovative height, impact, and a gritty team?
Do think: “Do I support more diverse founders?” “Do I recognize the impact?” “Do I need to hear her speak to understand the idea?” Don’t think: “Women should act like men to be funded,” “Be better next time,” and please don’t think “soft”!
Women still lack ‘a room of one’s own’—Virginia Woolf states in her brilliant essay (1929) that women need money first to be able to create quality output.
The Christmas dinner was great, although my mother probably was insecure about it. Note, I grew up on ecological food, thank you Mom!
#femalefounders
Thank you for this event and for creating this awesome community! 😍