Diversity is a key to rich ecosystems and in spite of basically zero participation from half the gene pool, start-ups are thriving across the country. Imagine if women participated in equal number to men… we would instantly double the talent pool from top to bottom and improve the ecosystem dramatically.

In the tech world, my guess is female founders, investors and advisers represent less than 5% of their respective buckets and even before Tereza wrote her post about XX combinator and prior to Eric’s piece on the importance of diversity the topic has been hot in my house. My wife is a female entrepreneur and a proud member of the women owned firms that make up 28.2% of businesses in the US (as of 2002). Bottom line, we are way behind and will improve the quality on all fronts if we can move toward gender diversity.

This 2xTuesday is a lesson in geometry — if you want to make the top of a pyramid taller, expand the base!

[caption id=”attachment_694" align=”aligncenter” width=”300" caption=”Female participation is off by a factor of 10…”]

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Aside from taking control of the wage gap and creating an empowering work environment, the world would be better if more women would jump into the start-up scene…More diverse thought leadership means more great start-ups changing the world in more amazing ways.