Launching While Female

September 7, 2020
Althoff, former editor-in-chief of Boston Globe Magazine, debuts with a wise collection of advice and encouragement for aspiring female entrepreneurs. Cautioning that startup founders skew overwhelmingly male, she provides hard-won advice from 100 women on overcoming systemic inequities and gaining access to venture capital. Profile subjects include lobbyist Virginia Littlejohn, who discusses how a focus on finding male allies helped secure passage of the Women’s Business Ownership Act of 1988, and Heroclip CEO Mina Yoo, who bemoans how “the conversation in business settings will always come around to her kids—and who’s watching them” in a way that doesn’t happen for her male counterparts. Sexual harassment can still be a problem for the entrepreneurs Althoff interviews, as is a lingering sense that a level of assertiveness admirable in businessmen is unseemly in businesswomen. But she offers skills designed to overcome these obstacles, such as deflecting unwanted advances and finding confidence by faking it, while celebrating the history of female entrepreneurship, from Madam C.J. Walker, a wildly successful early 20th-century provider of hair products for Black women, to today’s Jessica O. Matthews, founder of the clean-energy company Uncharted Power. Althoff’s incisive, practical guide should be required reading for any entrepreneurial woman.