There is a meaningful difference between how much women get paid for a particular job versus how much men do. On average, in the United States, women make somewhere around $.79 on the dollar compared to their male counterparts. It’s a well-trod story, and probably millions of bottles of ink—or whatever the digital equivalent would be—have been spilled in the last few years bringing this pay gap to light. You might be tempted to think, given the rise of fourth-wave feminism as a potent cultural force, that progress was being made towards equal pay for equal work. You would, however, be mistaken: according to the World Economic Forum, we are 132 years, almost a century and a half, away from true parity, and that date has only gotten further away. The pandemic pushed it back a full 30 years, but that’s assuming conditions don’t change. To compare, 132 years ago it was 1890; a lot can happen in that time.
Now, to be clear, that number isn’t a prediction, but the endpoint of a trendline. Frankly, nobody has any business prognosticating that far ahead, and if experience has taught us anything, it’s a fool’s game anyway. Capitalism might not exist that far in the future. Money might not exist. No, that number has nothing to do with the future and everything to do with today, with this world that women have no choice but to live in. Young women are more likely to have college degrees than their brothers, and yet we’re underrepresented in the careers those degrees are supposed to prepare us for. We’re more educated but lower paid, more likely to leave careers early, more likely to have our lifetime earning potential devastated by motherhood (whereas fatherhood gets men paid more). This is the world we were born into, and the existence of exceptions, like former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and even myself, doesn’t change the hard reality of what being a woman can cost.
I strongly believe that women have a responsibility, certainly an ethical one and possibly a moral one, to help each other climb. That means we have to extend more ladders instead of pulling up the one we climbed.
And we also have a responsibility to do for each other what women have always done throughout human civilization: build our own structures. It’s why I’ve been such a firm advocate for entrepreneurship as our best way forward, because change from the inside is all too often superficial, temporary, and at the whims of the men in charge. We advance best when we sidestep asking a powerful man for permission and take those leadership roles for ourselves; we’re more likely to hire or promote other women and to grasp the complexities of women’s lives and the burden of the expectation of performing primary childcare. Consequently, companies founded by women are best positioned to let women succeed and, on average, hire more than 2.5 times as many of us than other companies.
My foundation, The Elizabeth Elting Foundation, has a long-term partnership with NYU Stern School of Business’s startup incubator, Endless Frontier Labs (EFL), to provide funding to promising women-led startups in science and tech each year. This year, the EFL Elizabeth Elting Fund awarded funding to its third round of recipients: EV Biotech, MarParm Pharma, and TRIPP. EFL is a nine-month program designed for promising new STEM startups to learn and develop their businesses through mentorship and professional support from A-list business leaders, VC funders, and Stern MBA alumni.
Women founders are less likely to receive startup capital. In 2021, women-founded businesses picked up only 2% of all VC dollars, a share that has been declining since 2016 despite the fact that women have been founding businesses at a faster clip than men over that same period, and companies with at least one woman co-founder produce reliably higher ROI. In other words, the existing structures that fuel entrepreneurial successes aren’t serving us, so we must serve ourselves.
The talent being left unfunded staggers the mind, which is why programs that foster women-led startups are so vital. This year’s crop of EFL startups that my foundation is supporting—companies that, in the wild, may not have found funders at all—could all be world-changers. A fact that would be a profound loss to us all. There’s MarPam Pharma, which is developing a potentially revolutionary one-time treatment for HIV infection that enables patient immune systems to seek out and eliminate the virus without the need for daily medications. There’s TRIPP, which is developing a self-directed, fully immersive platform to provide neuroscientific-based psychedelic mental healthcare. And there’s EV Biotech and its microbial factories that use cutting edge computational modeling technology designed to reduce the time to market for new pharmaceuticals while also allowing more sustainable production. Why should businesses this profound have to settle for a slice of just 2% of potential funding solely because people don’t take women seriously?
I can’t predict the future. Nobody can. But it’s up to us to build one worth living in, and we start by investing in ourselves.
WRITTEN BY
Liz Elting