Presumably something risk related? Men take more risks, it&#x27;s documented, testosterone related. Working for a startup is risky.<p>At Google there was (when I worked there) perhaps about 20-30% female engineering staff. Or maybe it was a bit lower, I don&#x27;t recall, but it was pretty high. Yet as far as I recall, the new projects were typically started by men, I mean the bottoms-up ones. I never noticed it at the time, but thinking back, I&#x27;m struggling to think of cases where a woman started a new project with her 20% time (or even took it, actually). That might be just lack of data points of course. Projects created by employees weren&#x27;t at all rare there, but it still wasn&#x27;t something that happened every day.<p>Many women in software, by my experience, are from slightly poorer parts of the world: eastern Europe, Russia, China, India. I suspect to them programming is just a job; a way to earn good money. But it&#x27;s not something they&#x27;re especially passionate about in the single minded obsessively focussed way that men can be   (and I&#x27;m guilty of that).