I’m one of the lucky few people to have a female co-founder of a tech startup. And I have long known that working with senior women can often be a significantly more valuable experience than the traditional sausage fest. (Yes… I just said “sausage fest”.) It’s not that women are inherently better or worse… it’s that diversity and a balanced set of skills and styles help make teams stronger. Given that tech is still pretty much a boys club, and that in recent years the number of women going into engineering is going in the wrong direction, I’ve often thought about what can be done to fix this problem.

There are all sorts of points at which one could intervene to start correcting this, and when I had a big team at a big company, finding qualified women for leadership positions was the single most effective thing I could do. But now that I’m at a startup maybe there are other things I could do. I know my female co-founder is doing her part by providing incredible leadership both private and public here at JFM.

After some thought, I realized that I do have an opportunity to make a small impact — I have a seven year old daughter. She loves googling and YouTube, and she likes videogames and art and fashion. I did what any parent would do in my situation… I signed her up for a week of tech summer camp. Anything from videogame programming, to Lego robots, and (her choice) computer animation.

But who knew, as I drove her to camp the other morning, distracted and stressing the whole time about how much work I had ahead of me that day, that I would have the opportunity to rise slightly above my normal parenting muddle. My daughter started whining about how there would be no girls at computer camp, and the boys would make fun, and this wasn’t a girls’ activity. I started trying to reason with her. As many parents know… kids are often irrational. Cause… well… they’re kids. If they were completely rational, they’d be adults. Actually, they’d be better than adults, as most adults I know aren’t completely rational, especially me. Anyway… no amount of reason was working.

I pulled into the parking lot at the camp, stopped the car, and turned around to face her. I said: “Honey… do you want to be the kind of person who does what they want, or do you want to be the kind of person who doesn’t do what they want because they’re afraid of what other people will think.” I held my breath for what seemed like an eternity until she calmed down, lowered her head, and semi-mumbled in just above a whisper: “I want to be the kind of person who does what they want.”

Whew!

I said: “Great. Then let’s get to it.”

I don’t know what I would have done if she’d given me a different answer.

These movie-like parenting moments happen almost never (at least for me). So this one was particularly satisfying as not only did I feel good about our discussion, but I thought that maybe I was making the smallest of dents in the broader problem of making the tech industry a place where larger numbers of intelligent women leaders want to be.