A startup is traditionally the brainchild of one or several creative programmers - and less than 25% of programmers are women. This is not the only aspect of the current system that just isn't consistent with women's reality or, for that matter, with the reality of a society that has changed radically since the last bubble burst. And it's not just women who are at a disadvantage, but all entrepreneurs who don't have a technical background.

Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice

Social scientist Jane Margolis conducted a four-year study on women in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, which explored why so few high school and university computer science students were women. The study is pretty old - it was conducted from 1995-1999 - but things don't appear to have changed much since then, according to this 2009 study commissioned by Cisco. And though the Carnegie Mellon study addresses computer science education, for purposes of this article, I take the liberty of extrapolating and applying these findings to the startup environment in general.

In the Carnegie Mellon study, she found that:

[W]omen come to the field of computing at a different pacing and have different forms of attachment. [...]They attach their interest in computing to other arenas, to a social context that's more people-oriented. We refer to this as computing with a purpose as opposed to programming for programming's sake or a totally technology-centric focus.

The Tortoise and the Hare

Let's look first at the question of pacing. Women tend to take the entrepreneurial plunge later than men typically do, once they've had some professional and life experience (Why Women Mean Business). In fact, a study done in the U.K. in 2006 showed that women over 40 were more likely to start a new business than any other age group.

For this reason, certain elements of the current startup support system, like accelerators, or events like Startup Weekend, are not necessarily realistic or appropriate options for women founders in need of mentoring and funding. How many grown-ups - women or men - can reasonably be expected to drop everything and move across country for three months? More appropriate structures for those entrepreneurs who are past the footloose and fancy-free stage would be an incubator or accelerator program that resembled night school, or a series of intensive Saturday workshops.

An excellent example is Paris Pionnières, an incubator for women's projects in France, which offers a very flexible program. First there is a pre-incubation phase that includes six free workshops and monthly meetings over a three- to six-month time period. Once that is completed, the project is submitted to the organization, which decides whether to accept it into the incubation program. This lasts six to 12 months and can be renewed once. It is also flexible in that founders have the option of working in the organization's facilities or not.