I’m not much for the “women in tech” stuff — preferring to prove equality rather than beg for it — but sometimes the gender imbalance in this industry is so damaging that it would be unethical for me to not call it out.

About a year ago, I wrote a blog post titled The Plain Numbers About Women in Tech, presenting the raw data to prove that the highest profile startups employ very few women, and moreover that the vast majority of women who do work for startups are in roles that involve selling the product, not making it.

Some people shared in my dismay. Some people offered up the names of startups that have a more gender-balanced staff. Some people simply defended the places they work saying, “We’ve tried!” or “Does it really matter?”

A year has passed, and in a future post I’ll go back through those companies and check to see if their ratios have changed. But there’s something deeper here that I’d like to explore first.

On Twitter the other day, I saw some investor friends congratulate a fellow VC on being promoted at his firm. I clicked through to the firm’s website and navigated over to their team page. I immediately noticed something — all men. So I checked out some other hotshot VC firms off the top of my head — all men, almost all of them. I’d always suspected it I guess, but here they all were staring back at me.

As a user experience strategist, I have spent the entirety of my career devising ways to get companies to better understand the needs of their target audiences. Building a culture of empathy within the business is my most fundamental goal, and the greatest obstacle I face is convincing upper management that their customers are nothing like them, that they have to think outside of themselves in order to succeed.

So here’s my question: if all-male venture capital firms are investing in all-male startups, where is the female influence coming from? Who is guiding these companies on when and how to target women? With women making 85% of purchasing decisions and far surpassing men in their Internet usage, doesn’t it seem wrong that hardly any women are involved in controlling which companies create our future?

I thought it was time to take an empirical look at the gender ratio of some popular venture capital firms by looking at their team pages, as I previously did with the startups. I limited my research to firms that have a focus in early-stage funding, have funded > 5 brand name startups, and have funds worth > $100 million. Again, this is by no means a comprehensive study, but this is what I found.

Take a look for yourself…and let me know what you see.

NOTE: I excluded female staff NOT in investment positions (e.g., accounting, legal, biz dev, operations, admin) from the counts below. Yes, I did this all by hand.

High Profile Early-Stage Venture Capital Firms

Accel Partners

Team Page: http://www.accel.com/people/index.php
Women Investors: 4/40
Fund Size: ~$6 Billion [source]
Portfolio: comScore, 99 Designs, Birchbox, Diapers.com, Etsy, Kayak, Trulia, Groupon, LearnVest
Location: Palo Alto, CA; New York, NY; London, UK; Beijing, China; Shanghai, China; Bangalore, India; New Delhi, India

Andreessen Horowitz

Team Page: http://a16z.com
Women Investors: 0/6
Fund Size: $1.5 Billion [source]
Portfolio: Airbnb, Fab, Facebook, Groupon, Pinterest, Zynga, Skype
Location: Menlo Park, CA

August Capital

Team Page: http://www.augustcap.com/team/
Women Investors: 0/8
Fund Size: ~$1.3 Billion [source]
Portfolio: Six Apart, Aardvark, Evite, RelayRides, Blippy, Visio, Livemocha
Location: Menlo Park, CA

Bain Capital Ventures

Team Page: http://www.baincapitalventures.com/your-team/
Women Investors: 1/31
Fund Size: ~$1.5 Billion [source]
Portfolio: Blip.tv, Jott Networks, Lala, Rent The Runway, Color
Location: Boston, MA; New York, NY; Palo Alto, CA

Benchmark Capital

Team Page: http://www.benchmark.com/people/#
Women Investors: 0/9
Fund Size: ~$3 Billion [source]
Portfolio: 1-800-Flowers, eBags, Dropbox, Zipcar, Instagram, Twitter
Location: Menlo Park, CA; Herzliya, Israel

Bessemer Venture Partners

Team Page: http://www.bvp.com/Team/
Women Investors: 1/39
Fund Size: ~$2 Billion [source]
Portfolio: Pinterest, Shopify, Knewton, Twilio, Diapers.com, Soap.com, LinkedIn
Location: Menlo Park, CA; Larchmont, NY; Cambridge, MA; Herzliya, Israel; Mumbai, India

Charles River Ventures

Team Page: http://www.crv.com/team
Women Investors: 0/10
Fund Size: ~$2.1 Billion [source]
Portfolio: Yammer, HubSpot, Scribd, Wanderfly, Zendesk, Geni, Twitter
Location: Cambridge, MA; Menlo Park, CA

DFJ Gotham

Team Page: http://dfjgotham.com/team.html
Women Investors: 1/5
Fund Size: ~$6 Billion [source]
Portfolio: ADstruc, Drop.io, Medialets, Mimeo, Solvate, Totsy, Yipit
Location: New York, NY

First Round Capital

Team Page: http://www.firstround.com/team/
Women Investors: 0/6
Fund Size: ~$126 Million [source]
Portfolio: Fab, Get Satisfaction, GroupMe, ModCloth, Path, Taskrabbit
Location: San Francisco, CA; New York, NY; Philadelphia, PA

Foundry Group

Team Page: http://www.foundrygroup.com/team/
Women Investors: 0/4
Fund Size: ~$225 Million [source]
Portfolio: Fitbit, CrowdTap, Makerbot Industries, Gist, Cheezburger, Zynga, Medialets
Location: Boulder, CO

General Catalyst Partners

Team Page: http://www.generalcatalyst.com/team
Women Investors: 1/19 (early-stage)
Fund Size: ~$500 Million [source]
Portfolio: Airbnb, GroupMe, Hunch, Kayak, Rue La La, Chloe + Isabel, Upromise
Location: Cambridge, MA; Palo Alto, CA

Google Ventures

Team Page: http://www.googleventures.com/team
Women Investors: 2/13
Fund Size: ~$200 Million (annually) [source]
Portfolio: HomeAway, Nest, Read It Later, 23AndMe, Signpost, ThinkNear, RelayRides
Location: Mountain View, CA; Cambridge, MA; Seattle, WA; New York, NY

Greycroft Partners

Team Page: http://www.greycroftpartners.com/team/
Women Investors: 2/6
Fund Size: ~$200 Million [source]
Portfolio: Buddy Media, Klout, Pulse, Joyent, Crowd Fusion, The Huffington Post, Babble
Location: New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA

Greylock Partners

Team Page: http://greylock.com/teams
Women Investors: 1/16
Fund Size: ~$2 Billion [source]
Portfolio: Airbnb, Constant Contact, Coupons.com, Facebook, Groupon, Pandora
Location: Menlo Park, CA; Cambridge, MA; London, UK; Beijing, China; Bangalore, India

Highland Capital Partners

Team Page: http://www.hcp.com/highland_team
Women Investors: 2/27
Fund Size: ~$3 Billion [source]
Portfolio: CafeMom, Gemvara, Digg, Pixable, Rent The Runway, Paper.li, Yipit
Location: Cambridge, MA; Menlo Park, CA; Geneva, Switzerland, London, UK; Shanghai, China

Khosla Ventures

Team Page: http://www.khoslaventures.com/khosla/people.html
Women Investors: 0/8
Fund Size: ~$1.05 Billion [source]
Portfolio: HowAboutWe, RockMelt, Xobni, Square, AppNexus, ZocDoc
Location: Menlo Park, CA

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Team Page: http://kpcb.com/teams
Women Investors: 10/44
Fund Size: ~$900 Million (early-stage) [source]
Portfolio: Blue Nile, Zaarly, Flipboard, Groupon, Klout, Spotify, Path, Square, Nest
Location: Menlo Park, NY; Beijing, China; Shanghai, China

Matrix Partners

Team Page: http://www.matrixpartners.com/site/team_landing/
Women Investors: 0/9
Fund Size: ~$1.25 Billion [source]
Portfolio: Gilt Groupe, HubSpot, Care.com, Airvana, Apple (once upon a time)
Location: Palo Alto, CA; Cambridge, MA; New York, NY; Mumbai, India; Beijing, China; Shanghai, China

Polaris Venture Partners

Team Page: http://www.polarisventures.com/WhoWeAre/OurTeam.asp
Women Investors: 2/18
Fund Size: ~$3.5 Billion [source]
Portfolio: Automattic, Confluence, Formspring, JibJab, Turntable,
Location: Waltham, MA; Cambridge, MA; Palo Alto, CA; New York, NY; Dublin, Ireland

Rho Ventures

Team Page: http://kpcb.com/teams
Women Investors: 10/44
Fund Size: ~$510 Million [source]
Portfolio: Bluefly, GetGlue, OMGPOP, iVillage, Tapjoy, TACODA, Everyday Health
Location: New York, NY; Palo Alta, CA; Montreal, Cananda

RRE Ventures

Team Page: http://www.rre.com/#team
Women Investors: 0/8
Fund Size: ~$137 Million [source]
Portfolio: Betaworks, Bit.ly, HowAboutWe, Yipit, Xobni, Kik, GetGlue, Solvate
Location: New York, NY

Sequoia Capital

Team Page: http://www.sequoiacap.com/us/early ”
Women Investors: 10*/62 (early-stage) *all women are in the India and China locations
Fund Size: ~$1.3 Billion [source]
Portfolio: Airbnb, Funny or Die, Kayak, LinkedIn, Square, Eventbrite, Dropbox
Location: Menlo Park, CA; Herzliya, Israel; Beijing, China; Shanghai, China; Hong Kong, China; Bangalore, India; Mumbai, India; New Delhi, India

Spark Capital

Team Page: http://www.sparkcapital.com/team
Women Investors: 0/7
Fund Size: ~$720 Million [source]
Startups Funded: Twitter, Tumblr, Svpply, Runkeeper, Foursquare, Boxee
Location: Boston, MA

True Ventures

Team Page: http://www.trueventures.com/team/
Women Investors: 0/5
Fund Size: ~$378 Million [source]
Portfolio: 20×200, Automattic, Fitbit, Assistly, GoodReads, Plancast, About.me, Typekit
Location: Palo Alto, CA; San Francisco, CA; Falls, VA

Union Square Ventures

Team Page: http://www.usv.com/team/
Women Investors: 1/6
Fund Size: ~$450 Million [source]
Portfolio: Etsy, Boxee, Foursquare, Kickstarter, Meetup, Zynga
Location: New York, NY

Targeted to Women

A few female-led venture firms have cropped up with the mission to finance female-led startups, but they’re all managing funds well under $100 Million and are generally recognized as angel investors:

Golden Seeds

Team Page: http://www.goldenseeds.com/Funds/our_team
Women Investors: 8/10
Fund Size: ~$26.5 Million [source]
Portfolio: Lark, Little Passports, Sweet Riot, Tikatok, DRY Soda, Dancing Deer Baking Company
Location: New York, NY; Boston, MA; Philadelphia, PA; San Francisco, CA

Women’s Venture Capital Fund

Team Page: http://www.womensvcfund.com/about/team/
Women Investors: 3/3
Fund Size: Unknown
Portfolio: Ivy Corp
Location: Palo Alto, CA; Los Angeles, CA; Portland, OR

BELLE Capital

Team Page: http://www.bellevc.com/belle-angel-investor-team.html
Women Investors: 10/11
Fund Size: Unknown
Portfolio: Current Motor Company, Michelle’s Miracle
Location: Detroit, MI

JumpThru

Team Page: http://jumpthru.net/team/
Women Investors: 1/1
Fund Size: N/A
Portfolio: N/A
Location: New York, NY

Joanne Wilson

More info: O’Reilly Radar, The Next Web
Fund Size: N/A
Portfolio: Curbed (Eater/Racked), Food52, Red Stamp, Rick’s Picks, Hot Bread Kitchen, Gotham Gym, The Moon Group, Catchafire, Loverly, Daily Worth and MOUSE
Location: New York, NY

Bucking the trend

VC firms that aren’t specifically targeting female-run startups, but who have a predominance of female investors:

StarVest Partners

Team Page: http://www.starvestpartners.com/team/investment-team/
Women Investors: 5/6
Fund Size: ~$400 Million [source]
Portfolio: iCrossing, Insurance.com, ideeli, Bluestreak, Host Analytics
Location: New York, NY

DBL Investors

Team Page: http://www.dblinvestors.com/team.php
Women Investors: 5/8
Fund Size: ~$140 Million [source]
Portfolio: Tesla Motors, Pandora, Livescribe, Ecologic
Location: San Francisco, CA

Am I missing something?

So what do these numbers tell you? Have I forgotten about a VC firm with predominantly female investors? Am I unaware of some firms for-women-by-women?

Please set the record straight! Or share your thoughts on why we’re seeing this unsettling trend, and what we can do to make it right.

Further Reading

• CNN: Where the Powerful Women Aren’t
• Forbes: How Women are Getting Left Out of the Venture Capital Game
• Boston Business Journal: Is Boston Not an Ideal Place for Female VCs?
• Techcrunch: Silicon Valley: You and Some of Your VCs Have a Gender Problem
• Techcrunch: Stop Telling Women To Do Startups
• Inc: Can’t Get Funding? It’s Not Because You’re a Woman
• Where Are The Ladies
• Women’s Entrepreneur Festival

• The plain numbers about women in tech – The Startups
• Whit Hour – Week 16
• When You Startup With UX
• NY Tech Meetup: The European Edition
• List of Firsts: Saturday, April 19, 2008

The NY Tech Meetup, founded by Meetup.com founder Scott Heiferman and co-founded by Dawn Barber, has more than 19,000 members and draws 800 attendees every month. Last year, NYTM became a 501(c)(6) non-profit organization incorporated in New York State and as a result now has a Board of Directors that steers the priorities of the organization. There is currently one open board seat and I am campaigning to be elected.

My mission as a member of the NYTM Board of Directors will be to relentlessly advocate for the needs and desires of our membership, and to ensure that their priorities mirror the priorities of the organization.

Voting is now open for all members of NYTM who have RSVPed to at least one event, and continues through December 20. If you qualify to vote, I hope you’ll consider me to be your candidate.

At a Meet the Candidates event at New Work City tonight, each candidate was given two minutes to share their platform. I have shared the full-text of my speech below.

If you have any questions or comments about my platform, please don’t hesitate to ask here in the comments or via email at whitney@whitneyhess.com.

Thank you for your support.

I’m a user experience designer. That means I help organizations create easy and pleasurable experiences for their customers. And as a 4-year member of the NYTM, I can tell you that the experience of being an attendee has significant room for improvement. From the ticketing process, to entering the venue, to event format, Q&A, exiting and after party. We’ve become a really big crowd and as we’ve scaled, we have lost a tremendous amount of the camaraderie that existed in earlier years without equally increasing the value that the event itself provides.

I’m a native New Yorker, run a UX consultancy here and have worked with dozens of Startups who have had the heart to set up shop in NY. Whether in their infancy or adolescence, 5 users or 500,000, I have taught them how to understand and empathize with their customers, deepen engagement and create long-lasting fans. I show companies how to make people’s lives better.

When people pay $10 to attend a meetup, and have to hover over their browsers waiting for tickets to become available like it’s a Justin Bieber concert, we need to make them feel like it was the best $10 they’ll ever spend. Tickets need to be easier to procure, both for first-timers and for members who have supported the meetup for years. There needs to be total visibility into the demo selection process, with some degree of input from the NYTM membership. The demos — and the moderation — should be professional and rehearsed, with no duds; we should be training presenters on how to communicate their vision and wow the audience. And for a tech meetup, there absolutely needs to be reliable and powerful wifi, no excuses.

That’s what I want to do for the NYTM and that’s what I hope you’ll help me do by electing me to the Board of Directors.

Thank you.

• NY Tech Meetup — March 2011
• I was asked to join the IAI Board of Advisors
• Congrats to the new IAI board members
• NY Tech Meetup — February 2009
• I’m running for the 2008 Information Architecture Institute board of directors

It was 7:19pm. There I was, standing outside of Tarzian Hardware, its gate down and locked, the lights turned off. The store hours sign read Monday – Friday 8:30am – 7pm. I knocked on the window. I rattled the gate. I called the store from my cell phone with 8% battery remaining and could hear the ringing inside. No answer. I planned to leave a message in desperation in the hopes that someone would check voicemail overnight, but the mailbox was full. I was screwed.

The only copy of my apartment keys were inside.

I had brought them in an hour earlier to get dupes made, then left to run other errands. In my attempt to be efficient, I had made a fatal mistake: I never checked to see when the store closed. I’m accustomed to stores being open 24/7, certainly not closing at 7pm. Toto, we’re not in Manahttan anymore.

As I stood there hopeless, planning to ride the subway 45 minutes to stay overnight in my parents’ empty apartment (yeah, I had those keys!), I gave it one last ditch effort by Googling the store owner’s name in an attempt to find a home phone number. The store had only been closed for 20 minutes; the closing manager couldn’t be too far away, right?

Google turned up dry. I was out of options.

Just when I turned around to leave, I saw a man with a dog approaching the apartment building above the store. I had a game-time decision to make, and I went for it: “Excuse me,” I asked to his back as he put his keys in the front door.

“Yes?”

“I’m so sorry to bother you, but I was just wondering if you know the owners of this store.”

“I do.” Wow, Park Slopers are tight, I thought.

“Well do you happen to have their phone number? I didn’t know what time they closed and the only copy of my house keys are inside.” I was embarrassed to say it out loud.

“I have the keys to the store,” he said, and blood started coursing through my veins again.

“I can’t believe you have the keys to the store,” I exclaimed. “What luck!” He tied up his dog to a hydrant and got down on the ground to unlock the gate and the door.

As he undid the last lock, he looked up at me. “I’m the owner.”

Dumbfounded. Seriously?! THIS is Brooklyn.

Once inside, he found the copies of my keys under the counter along with the several screwdrivers I had put aside earlier to buy when I came back. When he was ringing me up and the cost was rising, he generously asked, “Did you mean to buy this brand? These are professional grade tools.” I thanked him for his honesty and told him that I was replacing some of my old and broken stuff, and a salesperson had helped me find these. “And these are the ones he told you to get?” He almost seemed upset that the guy had upsold me.

“I’m fine with these. I’ll never have to replace them again,” I said, grateful that he had been there to save me and eager not to shortchange him now.

As he finished up, I asked him his name (John) and his story (family business since 1921 that he now runs). I told him my name, said I was new to the neighborhood, and assured him that he’d be seeing a lot of me.

As we walked out and he closed up, I was struck by something: in 29 years, I’ve never introduced myself to a shop owner before. I’ve never cared to. I have greatly treasured my anonymity in the big city and have rarely engaged in small talk anywhere I’ve shopped. I’ve valued getting in and out quickly, silently, and mechanically. I truly don’t know why.

But I chose to move, chose to leave my native Manhattan with its deadly consumerist march and its Disneyfication and its hordes of tourists and multiplying big box chains. I wanted to live in a cozy neighborhood, to support its small businesses, to know its history and to become a part of it.

I’ve always wanted to go where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came. Where customer service is a moral obligation, not a business tactic.

I am home.

• Apple Customer Support Fiasco
• Photo of the day: LLUP to open
• Photo of the day: Whirlpool dishwasher utensil tray
• My high school computer science homework
• Photo of the day: Do Not Disturb

Two weeks ago, I bit the bullet and moved to Brooklyn. To my Manhattanite parents, this is a betrayal of epic proportions. To my childhood friends, I’ve lost my mind. But to the web community, what the hell took me so long?

I’ll tell you. It’s quite simple really. I’m not cool.

The same week I moved, I attended the much-acclaimed Brooklyn Beta. It was filled with borough-dwellers wearing plaid shirts and black-rimmed glasses. Even the women. They have nerdy tattoos and bed head. They take sketchnotes with fat markers and draw their own avatars. They live to build stuff. They want to change the world. I want to change the world too, but I’m not cool.

I have perfect vision and I’ve never dyed my hair. My body is a blank canvas dressed by Ann Taylor and her friends. I’m not skinny. I hate electronica. I can’t draw. I like money. I’m not cool.

I’m not popular cool and I’m not nerd cool. I’m not stylish or trendy, ironic or vintage. I’m not into politics or literature. I don’t follow sports or indie films. I haven’t seen the Star Wars trilogy. I couldn’t understand a Woot shirt if I tried. I don’t know what fonts were recently released by Typekit. I haven’t upgraded to iOS5.

I’m not friends with all the right people. I often feel like I don’t fit in. Sometimes it gets to me that I’m not on the inside. It can seem like everyone else is in on something I never caught onto. It can make me feel behind.

But then I realize…

I think we all feel judged. I think we all struggle to remain current. I think we all carry the burdens of high school too far into our adulthood. And the echo chamber is bullshit. No one has all the answers. No one knows the right way. We’re all in service to something much greater than ourselves and that’s what we each really need to focus on — not whether we’re accepted, or impressing anyone, or fulfilling another person’s expectations of who we are, who we’re supposed to be, and what we’re doing here.

I know exactly what I’m doing here. I’m doing me. You do you. Then let’s do ourselves together.

Get your head out of the gutter.

• December Flickr Updates
• Finding Myself in You
• Inspiration and Aspiration
• Web 2.0 Expo NY: Jason Fried’s “10 Things We’ve Learned at 37signals”
• Hanging out at IxDA’s Interaction09

The blog post I wrote about six weeks ago titled, You’re not a user experience designer if…, got way more attention than I ever could have predicted — in fact, I think it got the most traffic of any post I’ve ever written.

Sure, it’s an antagonistic title and that always gets people riled up. But I spend so much time talking and writing about what user experience design IS, I felt it was about time I wrote about what it ISN’T. I’m confronted with so many misconceptions on a daily basis that make our work all the more difficult.

A few notable comments

A lot of people agree with me, a lot of people don’t. I enjoy hearing both perspectives.

A few notable posts

As a result of the post, several other folks published their own perspectives. I swell with pride that I was able to jump-start this conversation, as I believe that conversation and debate and analysis is what propels our industry forward and makes us all better practitioners.

Being a Designer by Uday Gajendar

Getting Into User Experience by Karl Smith

Un designer d’intérieur d’estomac by Benoît Meunier

Humble Design by Rian van der Merwe

You might be a user experience designer… by Jack Moffett

You’re not a software craftsman if… by David Adsit

Translations

Having my writing translated into another language is one of the most thrilling experiences, not only because it means someone found my thoughts valuable enough to take the time to painstakingly translate, but moreover because it then reaches a whole other audience I wouldn’t have been able to connect with on my own. Thank you so much!

Você não é um User Experience Designer by Fabricio Teixeira

Vous n’êtes pas un UX designer si… by Julien Hillion

Ongoing

If you have additional thoughts on my post, please feel free to comment there or here. If you’ve written a post of your own about this topic, please let us know about it in the comments.

I hope this is a conversation that can continue as long as it takes for us to reach clarity around our roles and evangelize the value of the user experience practice worldwide.

• 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design
• Catching Up on Pleasure and Pain
• You’re not a user experience designer if…
• Are you new here? My top 10 posts
• See For Yourself on Johnny Holland Magazine

A year ago March 28, my close friend Samantha LeVan sent me a fairly routine email asking me if she could pass my info along to a young web designer looking for a mentor. It was so nondescript that I might have put it off for a few days, busy with other things. I’m glad I didn’t.

Hidden in the middle of the only paragraph was a sole sentence explaining the reason for her request: “Unfortunately, I just found out I have cancer (sucks I’m telling you this by email – so sorry!) so I need to stay focused on health and trying to keep my job going, and caring for Penny.”

I was stunned. Samantha, 33 years old at the time, had given birth to her beautiful daughter Penelope just four months earlier. After having what she thought was a terrible stomach flu and a persistent bacterial infection, some additional testing by her doctor revealed that she had cancer of the large intestine. It had to be removed. I was in shock, but Samantha was optimistic and had a CaringBridge blog set up immediately to share updates with family and friends.

The cancer was diagnosed as Stage III and required chemotherapy. She wouldn’t be able to lift her infant daughter for eight weeks. Luckily she was accepted at the world-renowned Mayo Clinic as a special case due to her age. While the initial 4.5-hour surgery was a success, Sam has had a slew of complications in the year since.

Problems eating. A clot in her liver intake vein. Chemo delays because her platelet count was too low. They put in a port so they could stop pricking her veins. Nausea from chemo brought her down to under 100 pounds. Meanwhile during all of this, little Penny kept getting colds and ear infections, and needed to have tubes implanted in her ears.

Her employer was wonderful about giving her time off and allowing her to work from home as often as she needed. In Samantha’s words:

“I’ve been working my ass off alternate weeks to show people that just because I go through chemo, I’m not sick. I’m totally capable of being a real force at work. I don’t want to be considered “special”. I can handle anything you throw on my plate as long as I have the freedom to have some flexibility with my hours. I worked nearly 50 hours last week. Proof positive that I’m just fine.”

By the end of September, Samantha declared herself healed and we all rejoiced! She has been spending time with her wonderful husband Craig and together they’ve been watching their daughter grow. Sam was 100% cancer free for Penny’s first birthday in November. Fate even had a special twist in store: In January, Samantha became a Senior User Experience Designer at the Mayo Clinic, the place that took such exceptional care of her for all those months prior.

I wish I could say it’s been smooth sailing, but sadly it hasn’t.

In February, Samantha was experiencing stomach pain again and, after a few days, checked herself into the ER. Due to complications from all the surgeries, there was a small tear in her intestine. If she hadn’t gone to the hospital that day, the doctors said she might have died. After an emergency surgery, she was left with 30 staples across her abdomen.

While she was healing, she caught a respiratory infection where fluid built up around her lungs and caused difficult breathing. She also contracted yet another bout of Clostridium difficile (C. diff) in addition to E. coli. And to make matters even worse, she continually blew her IV lines.

After three weeks in the hospital, she was finally released. The pain of missing her daughter was worse than everything else she had gone through. She’s just so happy to be home.

I’m telling you Samantha’s story because she can’t fight this alone. She needs emotional support and financial support. There are hospital costs, medications, tons of supplies, gas to and from the hospitals, at least two upcoming surgeries.

We have a goal of raising $5,000 for Sam and her family, but I want to blow that out of the water. Please give whatever you can to this tremendously courageous and resilient woman. Her disease has been a terrible financial burden that no family should have to bear. We can help. Please find it in your heart to help.

Thank you for your generosity and caring to read about my dear friend Samantha. And thank you to Sam for showing me what it means to have strength of character, compassion, and more hope than I ever thought possible. We love you, and we wish you well.

[http://fuckcancer.uxsters.com/samantha-levan]

• Being a godmother is like being a user experience designer
• Randy Pausch loses battle with pancreatic cancer at 47
• Why I detest the term “Lean UX”
• The outpouring of love for Randy Pausch
• Pleasure and Pain on Blog Talk Radio

You might remember the near-novel I wrote a couple months ago on LinkedIn InMaps titled, “Hubs and Connectors: Understanding Networks Through Data Visualization.”

Now New Work City member Alex Shapiro, founder of CEO of TouchGraph, has created a powerful network visualization based on contact exchanges made via Hashable at SXSW. The Java applet allows you to explore the clusters of people who were rubbing elbows in Austin last week and sharing their information by using Hashable’s #justmet hashtag.

On the graph itself, you can click on each node to view how many connections were made for each person as well as the direction of the exchange (meaning who recorded the interaction via Hashable). You can also adjust the zoom level and spacing between the nodes.

Under the Entities tab on the left, you can view a list of all nodes and sort by the number of people they met as well as the direction of the exchange. Under the Relations tab, you can see the entire list of #justmet interactions recorded, along with the detailed status message sent via Twitter.

For extra credit, click on the Show Clusters Control icon on the far-right of the toolbar to adjust the level of clusters shown on the graph.

Overall, TouchGraph’s visualization provides a ton of insight into how people move through a huge festival like SXSW, quickly finding their tribe, and continuing to increase the connections between tribe members instead of across tribes. You can also easily see the hubs within each cluster, as well as the connectors to other clusters.

I’m particularly amused by the folks who recorded their first meeting with several others, but who had few people record their meeting with them. This is very important piece of context and evaluation data that is missing from LinkedIn InMaps.

Thanks to Alex for giving me a sneak peek of this yesterday at NWC.

[Play with TouchGraph Navigator]

• Hubs and Connectors: Understanding Networks Through Data Visualization
• SXSW Interactive: Never As Good As the First Time
• Twubble
• Tips and Tricks for BlackBerry Users
• I’m here at SXSW and I want to meet you!

Yesterday a bunch of friends were tweeting about the new LinkedIn InMaps web app (part of LinkedIn Labs), so I had to check it out for myself.

Wow, wow, wow! InMaps are data visualizations of your professional network, based on LinkedIn connections, with you as the center node. I’ve been waiting years for LinkedIn to finally get its act together and start offering up analytics based on all the data we willingly store within it — but rarely make use of.

Here’s what my LinkedIn InMap looks like:

Immediately I started to explore all the hubs and nodes. You can easily see that Porter’s cluster theory is alive and well. The geographic, horizontal and vertical clusters in my network are clearly delineated, some more isolated than others.

After hovering over enough of the dots, I figured out what each cluster represents and was able to fill in the labels on the handy legend they provide:

So here’s my map with labels applied:

This amazing visualization has helped me confirm something I’ve always innately known about my network, and something I’ve always valued about myself: I’m a social floater. I’m a hub and a connector. I mingle in many different circles (both personally and professionally) and am the node between clusters. In more ways than one, this is the key to my professional success and something I actively cultivate.

Albert-László Barabási’s Linked is probably the best book you can read on the power of networks — it’s much more technical than Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. In Barabási’s chapter “Hubs and Connectors,” he writes:

“Indeed, with links to an unusually large number of nodes, hubs create short paths between any two nodes in the system. Consequently, while the average separation between two randomly selected people on Earth is six, the distance between anybody and a connector is often only one or two.”

“When it comes to networks, size does not always matter…As networks are clustered, nodes that are linked only to nodes in their cluster could have a central role in that subculture or genre…The truly central position in networks is reserved for those nodes that are simultaneously part of many large clusters…They are the people who regularly come into contact with people from diverse fields and social strata.”

It’s safe to say that I’m a user experience evangelist. I spend a lot of time writing on this blog, Twittering, speaking at conferences, writing for publications — all on the topic of user experience; all in an effort to heighten awareness, understanding, and practice of the UX discipline in the greater tech and business communities. Barabási succinctly writes: “Hubs coordinate the communication between the many parallel functions.” I cherish my role as liaison and facilitator, and am excited to be able to explore these topics further.

I’ve played with my LinkedIn InMap for hours, and here are some intriguing things I uncovered:

Size

The size of the node is an indication of the size of that person’s network. Therefore the bigger the dot, the more connections to it. The smallest dots on the map belong to my family members and non-tech-savvy friends who are each connected to fewer than 50 people. The biggest dots are hubs, which I’ll go into much greater detail on.

Distinction and Isolation

The most distinct clusters on my map are composed of my contacts from the three companies where I worked full-time (prior to going independent): Digitas, Tribal DDB, and Liquidnet. Digitas and Tribal DDB are both digital marketing agencies, so they are expectedly interconnected and thus close to one another on the map. On the other hand, Liquidnet is a financial software company — and the only finance job I’ve had. As a result, its cluster is highly isolated and distanced from the others. Its lack of connection to the rest of my network tells me that the finance industry is naturally exclusive, and highly specialized.

Clumpiness and Assortativity

Networks can be measured by their “clumpiness coefficient” and their “assortativity coefficient.” In laymen’s terms, these relate to the density and exclusivity, respectively, of each cluster. The two coefficients are combined to create four classes of networks, three of which I can observe on my map.

The “clumped assortative” areas of the network are UX and Liquidnet. The “loose assortative” areas of the network are Digitas and Tribal DDB, and CMU/HCI. Meanwhile the NY Tech Scenesters, Entrepreneurs, and Family/Friends/Misc belong to the “loose disassortative” network class.

These classifications were put forth in a paper titled “Clumpiness” Mixing in Complex Networks by Ernesto Estrada, Naomichi Hatano, and Amauri Gutierrez less than two years ago. It’s amazing to me just how much we have left to learn about the nature of networks in our rapidly-evolving society.

So, given the limited networks of my friends and family, as well as my varied, non-”community” relationship to them, it’s no surprise that their nodes are loosely clustered and non-exclusively connected to one another.

The Digitas/Tribal DDB relationship however is a classic example of high-density, highly-exclusive related networks; they’re defined both by employer and industry, which are both naturally assortative.

What intrigues me the most are the clusters for NY Tech Scenesters and Entrepreneurs. When my map was first created, I was actually confused as to why these networks were broken out into two, but after thinking about it, I realized that I do experience them very differently. Alternate names for these clusters could be social media and startups. Everyone is connected, but it’s a loose disassortative network because these people only share sector (technology) — not employer, function, or industry.

Another loose disassortative area in my larger network: my college friends who work in various industries and functions.

Hmm…come to think of it, UX isn’t clumped assortative, it’s loose assortative — part of the larger blob — because we share function and sector, but not employer or industry. But the lower area really does exhibit significant clumping. Maybe it’s some sort of hybrid. Let me chew on that.

Outliers

I started to look at some of the more isolated nodes to see who they are. Remembering Barabási’s words, I realized that outliers are connectors. They either cross sectors (finance and technology), cross industry (marketing and internet), cross function (UX and programming), or cross employer.

The outliers that sit between Digitas and Tribal DDB? Of course those are people who have

The outliers connected to Liquidnet and angled towards the center of the map are in fact my fellow former members of the Liquidnet UX team (cross-sector). Meanwhile the outlier connected to Liquidnet and angled upwards was a dev contractor (cross sector and cross-employer).

Infiltrators

As I was exploring, I noticed that there are a handful of nodes present in dense clusters that bear the color of another cluster. Interestingly, most of these nodes are of a smaller size, meaning that even though they don’t have large networks of their own, they are social butterflies who integrate themselves in multiple circles. A few of these are recruiters and publishers/editors.

Suddenly a giant infiltrator suddenly popped out at me — a pink dot in the zone between the dark blue cluster and light blue and light orange scatter:

Mr. David Armano. I totally should have guessed that.

David and I met at Digitas, my first job out of college, so that’s why he’s pink. But he has done a remarkable job of straddling the both the marketing and UX worlds, as well as being highly connected in New York because he grew up here and visits often.

When you click on a node in the map, their connections to your contacts are highlighted. So you can clearly see how David is a super connector between clusters:

Roles

There are different types of hubs, due to varying degrees of breadth of depth in each hub’s network. I’m still struggling with how to reconcile that an individual’s network map only shows the people to whom they are directly connected, therefore we cannot truly predict the shape of each contact’s own network — we can only represent their network in relation to our own.

Lou Rosenfeld is a localized hub, or in Gladwell’s terms, a “maven”:

So are Ali Khan, Shipra Kayan, and Consuelo Ruybal:

MJ Broadbent is a bilateral hub, or a “salesman”:

So are Eduardo Ortiz, Tony Bacigalupo, and Toby Vann:

Chris Pallé is a generalized hub, or a “connector”:

So are Jessica Valenzuela, See-Ming Lee, and Charlie O’Donnell:

I would guess that in other people’s network maps, I’m seen as a bilateral hub. Is that the case?

Gladwell would say that understanding the role each hub in your network plays can help to clarify its value to you, and identify what areas you still need to develop.

In Closing

There is a lot more exploration that I want to do here. I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. In the coming weeks, I’ll dig into other people’s maps, and compare their views to mine — particularly in an effort to begin to understand the relativity of these hub roles.

Any thoughts that you have to share on what I’ve written so far are welcome and wanted. And if you have any network theorists in your networks, please send them my way!

• Visualizing First-Time Interactions at SXSW
• The Meaning of Friend
• Blog of the Day on Logic + Emotion
• People you may know
• links for 2008-02-26

I have the distinction of being the longest-running member of Manhattan’s first and foremost coworking center, New Work City. But lately I’ve been staying home on the Upper West Side every day, working at my dining table or on the couch, instead of taking the 20-minute subway ride down to TriBeCa. It’s cold and snowy outside, and I’ve been lazy and anti-social. And to be perfectly honest, it’s making me kind of depressed.

This morning I read Underdogs, a new post on New Work City’s blog written by Tony Bacigalupo, one of my best friends and the owner and “mayor” of NWC. I was reading it on my iPad while lying in bed, and as soon as I finished it, I jumped up, ran over to my laptop, and started writing this post. Tony has a way of making people act. He embodies everything there is about coworking.

I was compelled to write this post because he helped me remember something, helped me realize why I’ve been lethargic lately and shutting myself in — because I’ve been spending every day alone. I have used up all of the energy I have to give myself. And I’ve been too depleted to recognize the greatest gift that coworking ever gave me: togetherness.

In the hyperconnected world we live in, with our smartphones and social networks and everything on-demand, it’s easy to feel like we have constant companions, like we have company over even when we’re home alone. But the reality is that we need to gather within four walls in order to truly be together. Together we can create the space in which we gather. It’s a virtuous circle.

There have been a proliferation of so-called coworking spaces cropping up all over New York and around the world. I’ve been to some of them, and they’re sterile, manicured, soulless environments. They reflect the people who started them — 21st century carpetbaggers — but have little connection or meaning to the people who fill the space. They’re simply a place to work.

New Work City is a place to live. It’s the place where I gained the confidence I needed to grow my independent consulting business, and have encouraged other people to do the same. It’s the place where I’ve made lifelong friendships and made new personal discoveries. It’s the place where I go to cry after a shitty client meeting, and the place where my belly laughs reverberate off the exposed brick walls.

Most of all, it’s a place I helped build, with my own two hands. Now I might not have done any of the manual labor that Tony, Peter, Jonathan, Ben, and Brian did, weekend after weekend getting our newest space built out. But I look around and see furniture from my parents’ old office, the Feel Better Soon box filled with meds and toiletries that I created two years ago, beanbags that I ordered, and hiding spots where I’ve stashed chocolate. Even when I’m not regularly present, my contribution to the space — and, more importantly, to the community — is no less relevant.

New Work City has its imperfections because we created it, together. It’s ours, not an investor’s. It reflects our goals and our ideals, our dreams and our intentions. Everyone is allowed to and expected to contribute to the vision and the evolution of the space, its purpose and its programming. No one’s trying to get rich here; we’re trying to change the world.

Polish eventually wears thin and flakes off, and what lives below the surface is never what it seems. With us, what you see is what you get.

Today, thanks to Tony, I remembered that despite being an independent consultant with no partners and no employees, I’m still very much a part of something. Something really special. And if I want to continue to feel together, I need to gather. I need to get up and go.

• By supporting New Work City, you make what I do possible
• Why I Work at New Work City
• I Scare Myself
• I wish I knew how to quit you
• In 2008, You Changed Me

I don’t often think of myself as a woman. As I approach public restrooms, I have to remind myself: “Whitney, you are a woman, use the women’s room.”

Being a woman doesn’t actively, consciously factor into my every day life, especially not professionally. While my gender must have a partial effect on everything I do — the way I interview users, draw wireframes, bill my clients — I am far from overtly feminine, nor do I consider myself to be traditionally female.

I have always wanted to be judged against all other people — male and female — and as a result, try not to play the woman card. I’ve also avoided most discussions about women in tech, women in business, women speakers, women organizations, women investors, women anything. A couple years ago I even insisted that I’m not a woman blogger.

It hasn’t ever really bothered me that there are so few women in my professional universe. I’ve always had more guy friends, went to a predominantly male university, and have worked mostly with men. But two things happened recently that rubbed me the wrong way:

Firstly, at the NY Tech Meetup a couple months ago, there were two products demoed by women. When a question from the audience was directed at one of the women-run companies, the other (male) presenters on stage started passing the mic to the wrong set of women. I’m not sure if anyone else noticed it, but it made me extremely uncomfortable. These guys couldn’t even remember which woman had demoed that product — just that it was a woman. The important detail of who didn’t seem to register.

Secondly, I was at the Boxee Box launch at Irving Plaza last month and, before the presentation started, Boxee’s team photos were projected onto the screen in a loop. I was proud to see how much the company has grown since I had worked with them in early 2009 — at the time, I had been the only woman among 10 men. But seeing the photos, I noticed that out of their 20 or so employees, practically all of the women working for them are in marketing.

It finally hit me: not only are women in tech mostly invisible, the vast majority of those who on display are selling, not making.

This is a problem. This is a big problem. At least according to ComScore [whitepaper], women are significantly more active social media and e-commerce users than men. So if the primary target audiences of most high traffic sites are women, why are only men designing and developing these systems?

I decided to take an empirical look at the gender ratio of some popular startups, just by looking at their team pages. I defined startups as < 50 employees and < 6 years old. This is by no means a comprehensive study, but I'm amazed by what I found.

Take a look for yourself...and let me know what you see.

High Profile Startups

Foursquare

Team Page: http://foursquare.com/about#
Women Employed: 6/40
Women’s Positions: Community Manager; Lead Designer; Marketing Manager; Head of Recruiting; Community Support Coordinator
Location: New York City

Kickstarter

Team Page: http://www.kickstarter.com/team
Women Employed: 4/14
Women’s Positions: Customer Service; Marketing; Community
Location: New York City

Squarespace

Team Page: http://www.squarespace.com/about/
Women Employed: 6/32
Women’s Positions: Support Team; Senior Designer; Marketing Director; Chief Marketing Officer
Location: New York City

Dropbox

Team Page: https://www.dropbox.com/about
Women Employed: 3/35
Women’s Positions: CFO; Support Lead; Office Manager
Location: San Francisco

Aviary

Team Page: http://www.aviary.com/about
Women Employed: ~5/30
Location: New York City

Square

Team Page: https://squareup.com/about
Women Employed: 10/54
Women’s Positions: Customer Support; Server Engineer; Recruiter; Financial Manager
Location: San Francisco

Tumblr

Team Page: http://www.tumblr.com/about
Women Employed: 1/16
Women’s Positions: Director of Outreach
Location: New York City

Vimeo

Team Page: http://www.vimeo.com/about
Women Employed: 4/31
Women’s Positions: Analytics and Marketing; Marketing Communications Director; General Manager; Community Manager
Location: New York City

Path

Team Page: https://www.path.com/about
Women Employed: 2/14
Women’s Positions: Executive Assistant; Recruiter
Location: San Francisco

Blip.tv

Team Page: http://blip.tv/about/people/
Women Employed: 7/31
Women’s Positions: Co-founder; Ad Operations; Office Manager
Location: New York City

Disqus

Team Page: http://disqus.com/about/
Women Employed: 1/13
Women’s Positions: Office Manager
Location: San Francisco

Hashable

Team Page: http://hashable.com/aboutus
Women Employed: 2/8
Women’s Positions: Chief Marketing Officer; Director of Business Development
Location: New York City

Venmo

Team Page: https://venmo.com/info/about-venmo
Women Employed: 0/7
Women’s Positions: None
Location: New York City and Philadelphia

BankSimple

Team Page: https://banksimple.com/#team
Women Employed: 0/9
Women’s Positions: None
Location: New York City and Portland

Targeted to Women

The only startups that seem to have a higher percentage of women are products or services that are oriented towards women:

Learnvest

Team Page: http://about.learnvest.com/company/team/
Women Employed: 7/11
Women’s Positions: Founder and CEO; CMO; Director of Product; Creative Director; Chief Content Officer; Editor; Financial Planner
Location: New York City

PlumWillow

Team Page: http://www.plumwillow.com/plum/team
Women Employed: 11/21
Women’s Positions: Director of Marketing; Community Leaders
Location: New York City

food52

Team Page: http://www.food52.com/blog/about_food52
Women Employed: 6/8
Women’s Positions: Co-founders; Editors; Recipe Testers
Location: New York City

Birchbox

Team Page: http://www.birchbox.com/about-birchbox/what-is-birchbox/
Women Employed: 4/4
Women’s Positions: Co-founders; Director of Interactive; Director of Content
Location: New York City

Rent the Runway

Team Page: http://www.renttherunway.com/team
Women Employed: 30/38
Women’s Positions: Co-founder and CEO; Co-founder and President; PR; Operations; Marketing; Merchandising; Creative Director; Customer Insights; Director of Finance; Director of Business Development; Visual Designer; Developer; Stylists
Location: New York City

Bucking the trend

Startups that aren’t specifically targeting female customers, but that appear to have higher percentages of female employees:

NabeWise

Team Page: http://nabewise.com/pages/team
Women Employed: 3/5
Women’s Positions: Founder and CEO; Creative Director; Director of Business Development
Location: New York City

Yipit

Team Page: http://yipit.com/about/
Women Employed: 3/8
Women’s Positions: Product and Operations Manager; Developer; Content Manager
Location: New York City

AdaptiveBlue

Team Page: http://getglue.com/about
Women Employed: 6/17
Women’s Positions: VP of Engineering; Developer; Editor; Community/Marketing Analyst
Location: New York City

Perhaps not incidentally, I am currently working with a startup that employs more women than men, and its product isn’t explicitly for women:

Loosecubes

Team Page: None yet
Women Employed: 7/9
Women’s Positions: Founder and CEO; Product Lead; Community Manager; Designer; Content Strategist; Street Team
Location: New York City

Am I missing something?

So what do these numbers tell you? Have I forgotten about several startups with predominantly female staff? Am I unaware of some startups with more women in the “making” positions than in the “selling” ones?

Please set the record straight! Or share your thoughts on why we’re seeing this unsettling trend.

• The plain numbers about women in tech – The VCs
• The Experience of Being a Woman
• Tweetup Goodness – 5/27/2008
• Yahoo!’s Shine
• Seeking All Independent User Experience Professionals in NYC