The Female Factor 'Something Powerful' for Women in Berlin's Technology Universe By MELISSA EDDY Published: October 10, 2012 BERLIN — The Berlin Geekettes insist that they have no mission statement. But their reasoning reads like one: They describe themselves as “a group of entrepreneurial women who share the belief that by organizing, exchanging stories, experiences, and building a community based on trust, something powerful can be created.”

Caroline Drucker is a country manager for Germany of Etsy, an online marketplace for handmade and vintage goods. And that “something powerful” is, for them, most certainly the power of women’s getting together and multiplying their influence by helping one another. This network, founded in February 2011, helps women in Berlin’s rapidly expanding, grass-roots technology scene. The group has attracted hundreds of young women at a time when the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel is sharply divided over the merits of a quota to bring more women into German boardrooms. Ms. Merkel herself is a trained physicist and self-declared “digital migrant” who extols technology advances but says little explicitly on the advancement of women. Berlin has gained international attention, and financing, as an incubator for technology start-ups in recent years. But there are no comparable high-profile female figures like those emerging in Silicon Valley in California: Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer at Facebook, or Marissa Mayer, the chief executive at Yahoo, for example. “There are quite a lot of women out there who are just doing it,” said Verena Delius, chief executive of Goodbeans, which creates apps for children. “But we have to get organized. You need to have good role models who are very transparent about how they are doing it.” There are several women in Berlin involved in interesting start-ups and technology projects or who founded their own companies. But none has achieved the widespread recognition of their male counterparts, said Jess Erickson, 28, who arrived in Berlin from New York in 2010. Ms. Erickson cites Zoe Adamovicz as an example. At 33, Ms. Adamovicz, a native of Poland who came to the city to study at Humboldt University of Berlin, is chief executive of Xylogic. The company recently introduced a product to help smartphone users navigate the jungle of apps and is the newest of six that she has founded since 1999. “Here’s a woman who’s sold many companies, built many companies, but she just doesn’t have that much media presence,” Ms. Erickson said of Ms. Adamovicz, a founding member of the Geekettes. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to showcase these women and share their stories and inspire more young women to pursue their own dreams of founding their own company?”’ Ms. Erickson, originally from Minnesota, had met many tech-oriented women at events and in February 2011 invited seven of them to an Asian restaurant in central Berlin. They swapped career advice and tips, and the Berlin Geekettes were born. The next steps included setting up a Facebook page, starting a blog and organizing regular meetings. Within months, membership rose to 50 and then to 100. By July of this year, about 220 women and girls were involved, and the Geekettes held a “summer meet-up” at Google’s Berlin headquarters, with talks by Ms. Adamovicz and Caitlin Winner, co-founder of Amen, a social-networking company. Slightly more than 2 percent of all working women in Germany are considered entrepreneurs or run their own companies, according to figures released in May by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That compares with just below 7 percent of all working men in Germany. If these numbers are to change, more girls and young women need support networks and other female leaders to serve as role models, the Geekettes say. Caroline Drucker, the country manager in Germany for Etsy, an online marketplace for handmade and vintage goods, believes that diversity in gender, social background and age are essential in moving the tech industry forward. She pointed to the current definition of success, stemming from Silicon Valley. “It’s all about money, dreams of billion-dollar exits, and it’s dominated by men,” Ms. Drucker told a group of women gathered on a recent Saturday in Berlin to talk tech and learn from one another. “A tech scene made up of different genders, ages, social backgrounds and problems to solve will lead to better thinking and better products.” Another definition that must change is how women refer to themselves, Ms. Drucker said, citing groups similar to the Geekettes in which women refer to themselves as “girls,” thus sending a subtle but wrong message. “A girl is supposed to be nonthreatening — she’s someone you can hang out with,” Ms. Drucker said, insisting that the term undermines women’s efforts to promote themselves. Ms. Drucker and Ms. Delius, the Goodbeans chief executive, urge women to use every opportunity they get to speak at conferences as a way to build networks and command respect. While Berlin’s start-up scene has a spirit of inclusiveness, with Americans, Australians, Danes, Swedes and Spaniards in their 20s and 30s outnumbering their German colleagues at most companies, old- fashioned attitudes do persist. Ms. Erickson recalled being told by the young, male head of a successful Berlin start-up that women “just don’t get tech” and that he “can’t hire a female developer because they will distract all the male developers.” Justin McMurray, an Australian who left London a year ago to start a recruiting company in Berlin, said that his experience had been the opposite. Women make up half of the six employees at his start-up, Somewhere, a creative recruitment business that relies on personality to match employers with job seekers. “They just had the best ideas,” Mr. McMurray said over a coffee at betahouse, a working space that has become a hub for entrepreneurs in the Kreuzberg neighborhood. He said most men he knew in Berlin shared his view that gender should not be an issue in hiring. Ms. Delius, who is raising two children on her own, agrees. At Goodbeans, Ms. Delius said, she shares leadership with a man and they strive to reach the same balance in their staff. “I tell women, ‘Don’t just go to a conference. Speak at a conference,”’ she said. “If you speak, more people will come up to you, and you will expand your network.” Ms. Adamovicz, the Xylogic chief executive, said being a minority in an all-male environment could be an advantage. She said that as one of only three women in her class at her university in Warsaw, she believed that the attention she received helped her to get ahead. “Attention is a very scarce good,” Ms. Adamovicz said. She insisted that femininity was an important “soft power” that women should not be afraid to use, especially in tough negotiations. “Being exotic in an all-male environment is fabulous,” she said. “It allows you to be weird; it allows you to disrupt their little games.” The Geekettes’ next goal is to begin an internship program that will link a female founder or woman involved in the start-up scene with young women interested in technology. “If you can show that women do exist within a tech scene, it can have an impact,” Ms. Erickson said. “We are often treated as a very small minority when in fact we are not.”