Twitter recently allowed all its users to see data about their followers. I almost tumbled out of my chair when I discovered that mine were 19% female and 81% male. I expected 70% would be female.
Y Combinator's Twitter followers are 85% male and 15% female. We asked many other prominent individuals and companies in the startup world and all their ratios were similar.
I feel like this new feature is letting us measure something we could only guess at before: the gender ratio among people interested in startups.
And what the numbers suggest is that it won't be enough just to encourage women who are already interested in startups to start them. The fundamental problem is that not enough women are interested in startups. So if we want to see more female founders, this is something we need to address. I have some ideas about how to do that, which I'll be working on in the coming year.