Even for women who have conquered the corporate ladder or started their own companies, taking care of a family can be a daunting task. “After I had my second child, I begged my parents to come over from the Philippines to help me take care of my kids,” Sheila Lirio Marcelo, the founder and C.E.O. of Care.com, said Monday night in New York City, speaking to a small group of female founders and entrepreneurs gathered around a dinner table. “And then my dad came, had a heart attack, and fell backwards on the stairs. There weren’t any options for me to find care, and I realized I wasn’t alone. Millions of people—particularly women—needed help and they had nowhere to find it.”
It was a theme that surfaced throughout the evening, the first in a series of Circle dinners hosted by Vanity Fair in partnership with Dell and Deloitte to bring female business leaders together to discuss what impacts women’s access to capital, markets, mentorship, and technology. The events, which will also take place in Chicago and San Francisco next month, will culminate in an open letter to the next president and Congress, recommending ways that they can create policies that will help women founders grow and create jobs. The discussion ranged from what policies should be put in place to support women to how to bring more gender equality to the boardroom; from building a better pipeline for female entrepreneurs to the importance of science and technology education for young girls.
The group shared how they in their professional lives have relied on the help of other women to share resources, shepherd them into networks, and find business and funding, as only about 7 percent of all venture-capital funding in the U.S. goes to women.
Part of the problem that Marcelo faced when she was first pitching her business to investors was that the vast majority of venture capitalists are men, and the vast number of them didn’t understand the need for her start-up, Care.com, since she said many of them aren’t the ones making decisions about childcare. “There were a few incredible male leaders who understood female-focused businesses,” she said. “Was that rare? Yes. It continues to be rare.”
She told a story about being in a room full of investors during a road show when one of the men in the room questioned whether the Web-site would attract repeated users. “Why would I need to use your service again once I’ve already found a babysitter?” he asked. Before she could answer, the one woman investor in the room piped in. “I’ve used the service six times in the last eight months. Can we please move on?”
“I had to explain that they don’t need to be the ultimate customer to understand whether a female company can be a good investment,” the Care.com founder and C.E.O. said.
She faced a particular difficulty in explaining to investors the greater implications her business has, beyond helping mothers find babysitters in a pinch. Access to good care, Marcelo said, is one of the more pressing issues that often gets shoved aside. If children don’t have access to quality care during the early stages of their development, then the entire nation becomes less competitive: if parents aren’t given paid time off, then businesses will miss out on the talents of a huge segment of the workforce; and if care-takers aren’t compensated fairly, then high-caliber elder care simply won’t exist, which will balloon healthcare costs, she said.
All of this explains why Marcelo thought it was so important to see both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump address child care and paid leave in their opening statements during the first presidential debate earlier this week. “I was thrilled to see this elevated to a real issue,” she said. As to who she thought would be the better candidate to take on those issues in the White House, Marcelo demurred. She’s a C.E.O. of a public company, after all. She had a board meeting to get to.
