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Tips For Female-Dominated Startups In A Male-Dominated Industry

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By Erin Flynn (Founder, Righting Style) As soon as people hear the “F-word,” it’s as if the sentences that follow turn into a foreign language unknown to man. I’m not talking about the F-word that rhymes with a certain feathery, orange-billed animal. In fact, that potty-mouth version is probably more socially accepted than the “F-word” I’m imagining.

I am talking about the F-word that ironically rhymes with passion: Fashion.

Anytime I mention the word fashion, I’ve found that I must immediately defend my intelligence and throw

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Where Are Women Founding Tech Companies?

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By Deborah Jackson (Co-Founder, Women Innovate Mobile) Editor's note: Check out this network map for Women Innovate Mobile (WIM), inspired by Fast Company's infographic of Y Combinator's network.

Since the Women Innovate Mobile launch on December 21, 2011, we've received inquiries from entrepreneurs across the U.S. and across the globe.

Thanks to JumpThru's designer, Tina Gong, we've got clearer picture of who's applying to WIM:

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4 Myths About Female-Founded Startups Debunked By 2012 PITCH Competition Finalists

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By Rebecca Lipon (Application & Judges Coordinator, PITCH Competition 2012) Women 2.0 PITCH Conference culminated in a PITCH Startup Competition five months in the making. Online applications were judged by representatives from 20 VC firms to select our finalists.

Our finalists demonstrated exactly what we at Women 2.0 have been saying for a while - women are starting companies outside the "pink-collar" space with varied backgrounds at different life stages targeting every phase of the investment cycle.

Here are 4 myths our finalists annihilated:

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Challenge To Investment Community: Go Beyond Pattern Matching

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By Christina A. Brodbeck (Co-Founder & CEO, theicebreak) Silicon Valley and the tech community is built on hope. It’s built on beliefs, expectations, and a desire for things to happen. As an entrepreneur, you passionately believe in your idea. As an investor, you believe in a particular founder or team. As a community, we want to believe that anyone and everyone has an equal chance of success.

Hope is what keeps us going; it acts as a bridge to seeing a desire become reality, and it acts as an initial catalyst. There’s been a lot of talk recently about making Silicon Valley

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Stop Sabotaging Your Own Success: A Manifesto

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By Sara Rosso (VIP Global Services Manager, WordPress)  

If you’re new here, you should probably read my biography just to give you a better sense of who I am. In short: I do a lot of stuff. I’m curious. I love learning. I take risks. I speak my mind. I dare.

The risks I take are reinforced by a belief that I owe it to myself to at least try. I’ve always seen myself as a bit of a Jack of all trades, rather than an expert in one subject, but I’ve come to believe that’s a blessing rather than a curse. Releasing myself from the aim of being an expert or being perfect at something means that I have the complete and utter freedom to try. And fail.

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Creating New Generation Of Hackers With CoderDojo, GitHub

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By Susan Hobbs (Conference Program Chair, TechCrunch) On Saturday afternoon a group of 30 pint size wannabe hackers gathered at the GitHub offices in San Francisco for the first CoderDojo in the United States. Irish teen sensation, James Whelton had traveled to San Francisco to take his highly successful social hacking education platform to the United States.

CoderDojo began in Whelton’s final year of high school when he convinced the administration to lend him a room to begin a computer club after school. What Wheton thought would be a handful of geeky friends getting together to share their coding skills

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The New Girls Network: Building A Bigger Pie For High-Growth Women-Led Companies

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By Joshua Henderson (Director of Programming, Springboard Enterprises) There are incredible things happening in the startup world for women entrepreneurs.

Media platforms like Women 2.0, The Daily Muse, EZebis and The Next Women are showcasing the talents and expertise of women founders and entrepreneurs.

Investment firms like BELLE Capital, Golden Seeds, Phenomenelle Angels, KC Women's Capital Connection, Illuminate Ventures,

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From Semiconductor To Matchmaking: The Road To Dating Sauce

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By Lien Nguyen (Co-Founder, Dating Sauce) I arrived in Silicon Valley full of energy, passion and optimism, as any new graduate should be in May 2004. I had finished my finals on a Thursday and then spent the following two days cleaning my entire apartment and shipping everything that I owned. I started my new job at Intel as a hardware engineer, leaving behind the calm and gentle cornfields of Illinois only four days after my last final exam.

When I was in school, I thought very little about my career. I always admired some of my friends who knew exactly what they wanted the minute they left college, but for me

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Why We Need To Foster Women’s Leadership In Education

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By Harrison Kratz (Community Manager, MBA@UNC) Thanks to initiatives and leaders such as Change the Ratio, Women 2.0 and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, women’s entrepreneurship and leadership in business has been a hot topic over the last several years. While much progress has been made, the higher education system has yet to be a force in driving women business leaders and entrepreneurs. Seeing how education is still one of the key foundations in this country, this has been troubling. However, there are solutions that can boost the education of women in entrepreneurship

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3 Ways Startup Women Can Push Through the Glass Ceiling

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By Geri Stengel (Founder, Ventureneer) Jorge Calderon was a venture capitalist who wanted to invest where others weren’t. He found his under-served market: women- and minority-owned businesses.

Only problem was, he couldn’t find entrepreneurs in that niche. He was sure they were there; he just couldn’t find them. So four years ago, he started Springworks to show women and minority innovators how to catch the eye of venture capitalists.

What he’s really doing is rebuilding the eco-system

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Tech’s Glass Ceiling Stronger Than Ever: Companies Aren’t Telling

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By Bianca Bosker (Technology Editor, The Huffington Post)  

Though the tech sector prides itself on disruption, innovation, and a total disregard for the status quo, there's one part of it that appears impervious to change: the glass ceiling.

Even as other traditionally male-dominated sectors, such as financial services industry, have diversified their ranks by adding more female leaders, the tech industry has lagged behind in admitting women to top roles, as well as tracking their progress in the workplace, according to a Thomson Reuters report examining changes in gender equality between 2005 and 2010.

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Defining The “All” In “Having It All”

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What should be evaluated critically is the definition of "all". By Leah Eichler (Contributing Writer, Femme-O-Nomics)

Can women have it all? It’s a question that repeatedly creeps up in this ongoing dialogue on women and careers. I frequently encounter contemporaries who believe it’s the duty of women in their 30s and 40s to warn this next generation that they cannot “have it all.” They fret about new graduates who are certain their future holds generous salaries, lofty titles, a partner with the same and maybe even kids in private school by the time they hit their mid-30s.

I never want to quash those dreams. I entertained them myself at one point and still believe the possibility exists for those

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Dropbox Acquires Online Collaboration Tool Cove, Co-Founded By Ruchi Sanghvi (AKA Facebook’s First Female Engineer)

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By Samihah Azim (User Experience Product Manager, 6waves Lolapps) The past week has been a particularly exciting week for women in technology. First, mobile search engine startup Chomp, co-founded by CTO Cathy Edwards, was acquired by Apple.

Then Dropbox announced their acquisition of Cove, an online collaboration tool for groups, co-founded by Ruchi Sanghvi. She was also the first female engineer at Facebook.

Cove's founders, Aditya Agarwal, Ruchi Sanghvi, and Akhil Wable had previously been Facebook executives.

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The Women 2.0 Editorial Staff.