Categories
Allied Arts & Media Curated

Field Trip App Puts Historical Women on the Map

‘Women on the Map’ is a project of the SPARK movement created from the concern of the invisibility of historical women figures all over the world.

After noticing that from 2010 – 2013 only 17% of Google Doodles around the world honoured women, the not-for-profit company approached Google to fix the problem. Google agreed and the two groups have worked together through the Field Trip App to feature more historical women figures.

Now, when users log into Field App and enable history notifications, their phone will buzz when they are approaching a location where a woman made history and can read about her and her achievements.

What is interesting about SPARK is that they are run by an international team of girls ages 13 to 22. Self described a “girl-fueled, intergenerational activist organization working online to ignite an anti-racist gender justice movement,” SPARK did all the research and work on the 100 women who are currently featured on the app.

Some of the historical figures featured are:

The Arpilleristas in Santiago Chile: A group of women who wove colorful tapestries documenting the turmoil and violence of Pinochet’s regime.

Mary Ellen Pleasant in San Francisco, CA: An activist and abolitionist who, among other things, would dress like a jockey to help slaves escape their plantations.

Mary Anning in Lyme, England: A renowned fossilist who discovered fossils of a Plesiosaurus, rocking the scientific community to its core.

The list is still small but this is only the beginning. SPARK is asking for people to nominate more women and contribute to the database. So if you have notable feminist entrepreneurs from history that you want to see put on the map, check out their website for more information about getting involved and supporting their cause.

Categories
Systems

Are Nonprofits Getting in the Way of Social Change?

The ability to bring about change is as powerful today as it has ever been.

Through the actions of many people, groups and technologies, transformational social change is within new reach but it is also causing new and very different expectations of nonprofits groups.
In his provokingly titled article for the Stanford Review, Paul Klein explains why nonprofits are losing their monopoly as the most effective agents of social change.
Klein is the President and Founder of Impakt, a Toronto-based corporate social responsibility consultancy. He believes that significant new innovation from nonprofit organizations will not be possible until they begin embrace structural change themselves.

Unless nonprofits evolve, he explains that corporations, B Corps, and social enterprises will eclipse them. Funders have become impatient with the status quo in the nonprofit sector. They are limiting themselves by “slow-moving, institutional, and self-interested business practices” – making significant social change almost impossible.

Funders at all levels expect high performance and as a result are more selective about what nonprofits they support. They want social change organizations to do whatever it takes to get the biggest results at the lowest cost in the shortest period of time. They also want to see more collaborative efforts between companies and countries in setting strong goals, having clear plans, and openly demonstrating progress.

So the big question is, should nonprofits be biased towards putting themselves out of business?

With constraints to agility and innovation, Klein argues that it is time for nonprofits to be less bureaucratic and more responsive to the changing contexts in which they operate. “Funders are expecting significant change from charities,” writes Klein. “Starting with an intention of being much less institutional and much more entrepreneurial.”

Jay Coen Gilbert, cofounder of B-Lab explains that funders want to focus on what works. He outlines some of the changes that would help move organizations toward solving issues faster in a way that funders want to see:

  1. Pay-for-performance: Linking salaries and bonuses to specific social change objectives.
  2. Establishing review process: Looking at the data of all programs to identify initiatives that (a) other organizations would handle better or (b) consider partnerships with the private sector in order to improve performance
  3. Introducing new exit protocol: Major supporters would diminish investment requirements as social change outcomes improve.

Many are still uncertain however of how shifting to a new structural model would fair for the majority of nonprofits. Mission drift, loss of focus on the communities and budget restraints are among the primary concerns. The gap between the capacity of small nonprofits versus large nonprofits raises another important question of how would smaller, local nonprofits benefit from a switch to for profit models.

For the full article and discussion, visit this link.

 

Categories
Uncategorized

Is Crowdfunding Leveling The Playing Field For Entrepreneurs?

With access to a computer, creative strategy and hard work, Crowdfunding is proving to be a viable way for founders to access capital and secure early stage investment. Now more entrepreneurs who suffer from limited access to capital and VC networks, can find funding more efficiently and successfully.

This is especially true for entrepreneurs who feel they face discrimination based on who they are or where they come from. A 2014 study from NYU and Wharton reported that women-only teams had a 40% better chance of meeting fundraising goals using crowdfunding.

In a Fast Company article, Ryan Caldbeck, CEO of crowdfunding platform CircleUp, tells writer Lydia Dishman that he doesn’t believe the success of crowdfunding to be gender-specific. He believes that women “are a clearly identifiable group that is benefiting from this transformation, but there are many others, including entrepreneurs in rural areas.”

In the article Dishman speaks to how crowdfunding acts as a buffer to unconscious bias and benefits underserved entrepreneurs. Aside from Caldbeck, Dishman also talks to entrepreneur Bonnie Marcus, author of The Politics of Promotion, and serial entrepreneur Courtney Nichols Gould, cofounder of SmartyPants vitamins, about what it takes outside of a capital campaign to secure growth for your company.

Read the full article here: Is Crowdfunding Leveling the Play Field for Female Entrepreneurs?

Categories
Our Voices

If Santa was a woman, could she do the job?

We’re still smiling this Wednesday, albeit a bit nervously. What started as a bit of elfish fun about gender inequality, surfaced a real issue about who and what are shaping our children’s gender perceptions.
London creative agency Anomaly worked on Elle Magazine Uk’s #MoreWomen campaign which highlighted how few women there are in senior positions.

For Christmas they wanted to create more conversation about perceptions of gender. In their 90 second video they asked children “If Santa was a woman, could she do the job?”

The response they received was disturbingly based on bad stereotypes.

The “women can’t drive” stereotype:
“She would get lost in the sky.”

The “women can’t possibly do anything else if they have children” stereotype:
“If she had a baby then she’d be like doing the presents, taking care of the baby, giving it milk…”

And our personal favourite, “the delicate flower” stereotype:
“She would get a headache.”

Save for one boy pointing out that “Girls aren’t any different than boys,” the video concludes by asking what would a lady Santa be good at, which the last child undoubtedly concluded would be “Cooking.”

Terrible right? But there it is. Now the big question is how can we start amending theses stereotypes before a future generation of CEOs, VCs and HR teams are tainted too?

Excuse us while we go re-pen our own wish lists to Santa.

Categories
Allied Arts & Media Our Voices

Vision

My Vision
by Marni Levitt

Turn off your television
and have a listen:
I was born to realize this,
I have a mission.
Every time I open my eyes
I have a vision:
We get to make the decisions
of how we want
life to be.
The future is not
pre-conceived you see.
 

Categories
Uncategorized

Why are women less likely to be entrepreneurs than men?

Wharton management professor Ethan Mollick, recently spoke in an interview on the Knowledge@Wharton show about a study he co authored with Venkat Kuppuswamy that explores the impediments to entrepreneurial success faced by women.

The study looked at more than 90,0000 Kickstarter projects – 30% of which were created by women. Researchers focused on key questions including: how likely are you to start a second venture, and were men more overconfident than women, as opposed to being optimistic?

“In fact, overconfidence is the biggest psychological predictor of whether or not you’re going to become an entrepreneur.” say’s Wharton. “Having misplaced confidence in yourself and thinking you can win when other people always lose is a strong predictor of entrepreneurship. We call this kind of overconfidence classic, Greek-style hubris — the idea of unfounded self-confidence.”

The study defined optimistic as the entrepreneur who would launch another project because the had missed their fundraising target. Comparatively, Overconfident defined those who decided to try again despite missing their first target.

On average, the results showed that women were less likely to launch another project regardless of whether their first attempt had succeeded or failed. They were also more dissuaded by big failures. These finding led researchers to believe that women had lower levels of overconfidence, and higher levels of humility.

The study concluded that men and women perceive failure and success differently. Women see failure as a sign that they are not cut out for entrepreneurship, Men see it as a stumbling block that they can overcome if they try again. Women tend to view success as sheer luck, where men will see it a s a testament to their natural skills and hard work, despite if they have previously failed or not.

“We found that — in our sample, at least — if women were as immodest and as unhumble as men, and as overconfident, there would have been 30%, roughly — about 28% — more female founding attempts in our sample,” Mollick says. “That was a huge number of people being discouraged by this psychological characteristic. It explained a lot of the gap in the founding rates between women and men in our sample.”

Mollick noted that this type of mentality hurts women as a group. Individually it saves them from not buying into doomed ventures, but with fewer women buying into the idea of the entrepreneurial “lottery ticket” you have fewer “lottery winners” as women, which means fewer role models for women entrepreneurs.

Mollick brings up the the issue of homily and the principle of “birds of a feather flock together.” The Boy’s Club is a network that has been in place for 10 – 20 years and people tend to like people like themselves. VC’s tend to be mostly male; they have friend networks that are mostly male. This results in a strong network of men who talk to each other, which can make it much more difficult for a woman to get access to the right kind of people when launching an enterprise.

This was most likely chivalric venture capitalist Sir Michael Moritz’s issue. It’s not a question of how hard you look, but what you can actually do to help support the representation and promotion of women in areas where they face the most disadvantage.

Mollick explains one experiment where researchers took a successful Kickstarter project and we created two exact versions of that project. The only difference was between the two creators — in one case, it was created by Jessica Smith, in the other case, it was created by Michael Smith. Everything from clothing, to presentation style, to natural good looks was on the same level.

Researchers wanted to figure out whether the project being created by a man or a woman made a difference, so they asked participants to judge where project quality was better.

Mollick explains their findings:

“We found out that men didn’t care whether a project was created by a man or a woman. There was no significant impact. At least in this case, it didn’t seem to move the needle. With women, it turned out to be really interesting. Two-thirds of women actually thought the project created by the man was better than the project created by the woman.

[However], we took a bunch of measures, and we realized about one-third of the women in the sample were what we called “activists.”

These were women who knew that women were underrepresented in technology. They felt that women suffered from discrimination in this field, and they thought it was important to try and fix that. They thought either the government should help or they should help or it was important to try and change this. Those women were much more likely to [fund] a project created by a woman.

So all of the success that we found — the reasons why women were doing better than men [on Kickstarter] — came from a small group of women who were helping to support other women in areas where there was the most disadvantage for them.”

So the answer to the mystery of where are the women does not lie in how do you increase the numbers of women entrepreneurs and having more participate. Instead, for real change to happen, it comes down to how involved you are willing to get in actively making change happen.

For more information on Hubris and Humility: Gender Differences in Serial Founding Rates, listen to the podcast interview on the Knowledge@Wharton show on Wharton Business.