Shine A Spotlight

Throughout the research process behind ideaflow, I was consistently disappointed at how few stories are widely-told about remarkable women in the history of innovation. That disappointment was actually the genesis of the first season of the Paint & Pipette Podcast (with my friend, esteemed entrepreneur and venture capitalist Mar Hershenson), in which Mar and I sought to highlight some spectacular female founders and the stories of their entrepreneurial journeys.

I have realized that if I want to be able to tell different stories myself, whether to my four daughters at home, or to the thousands of people I touch through classes and events each year, I need to seek out different stories, and Mar has proven to be a willing and gracious co-conspirator on the learning journey.

All of that to say, I’m at least somewhat familiar with the problem of representation in the realm of my own expertise.

And yet, that awareness not withstanding, I was still taken aback by the research, referenced in Craig Wright, Ph.D.’s thoughtful new book, The Hidden Habits of Genius: “Recently, I surveyed more than 4000 adults, asking them to name a dozen geniuses in Western cultural history. My respondents were all students, 57% women and most over age 50, enrolled in a continuing education program operating in seventy-three U.S. cities. The aim of my survey was to determine how far down the list of geniuses we would go before landing upon a woman. Even among the strong female majority of respondents, the first woman emerged on average in eighth place.…

The historian Dean Keith Simonton, who has researched genius for more than forty years, has numerically demonstrated the underrepresentation of women in fields traditionally associated with genius. According to Simonton's statistics, women make up only about 3% of the most noteworthy political figures in history. In the annals of science, fewer than 1% of notables are women, a mere drop in an otherwise all-male sea. Even in the more ‘female-friendly’ domain of creative writing, female luminaries constitute only 10% of great writers. In the realm of music, for every Schumann or Mendelssohn, there are ten well-known male classical composers.”

This research reinforces the urgency around the need for new stories to be told. Who are your favorite female inventors, creators, and entrepreneurs? Really, I’d love to know. I’m eager to shine a spotlight on unknown, underrepresented stories. It’s just another way I hope to challenge the paradigm in my own field.

Related: Enlist A Co-Conspirator
Related: Challenge The Paradigm

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