In the last 48 hours, Vice’s Motherboard and The Guardian published articles about how Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and other tech influencers barely follow any women on Twitter. Musk responded with a tweet that the Vice reporter was part of the PC police and that Musk only follows the media and reporters (who happen to be men).
It’s easy for influencers to feel snubbed by articles calling them out. But snubbing aside, the lack of diverse networks is incredibly problematic. Why? Because if you want to help solve the world’s toughest problems facing our communities nationally and globally, only listening and interacting with other influential men in your network gives you a severely limited perspective. You will only hear about how men (typically cisgender and white) view the world and their limited scope of how to solve problems. By narrowing your networks like this, you’ve filtered out so many other diverse perspectives, which would otherwise bring different and innovative ideas into your world.
I’ve witnessed how diverse networks have the power to shake up the startup world and the tech sphere. Over the past year and a half the Women Startup Challenge has introduced 1000+ diverse startup founders to a network of investors, which has led to more investments in women-led startups. But if these investors only networked with people who looked like them, they would have missed out on funding some big ideas and game changing ventures in areas like health tech, energy storage, and fintech, to name just a few.
If you want to start (or continue) listening to more diverse perspectives across Twitter, here’s a list of 100 women immersed in the worlds of tech, startups, investors, and media to get you started. There’s thousands more women that should be on this list, and I’d like to encourage you to continue adding to it. Feel free to post your name, background, and Twitter handle in the comments.
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