Forging links from women to wealth
By L. A. Chung
Mercury News
What happens when a New York media organization specializing in “women’s news'’ wants to make its first West Coast foray to meet supporters? It gets Margarita Quihuis, Silicon Valley venture capitalist, to make the introduction.
“In many parts of the world the news, `It’s a girl!’ is met with disappointment,'’ Quihuis said to guests at the evening reception honoring Bay Area women in San Francisco Thursday night. She said the reason she joined the board of the non-profit online news service, Women’s eNews, was that it provides the opportunity to put issues overlooked by other media on the national agenda.
“We can’t solve problems unless we know they exist, we can’t manage what we don’t know, we can’t solve what we don’t know,'’ she said, sounding for a moment like the Stanford engineer she was trained to be.
Fostering entrepreneurs
Quihuis sees connections between the work of the news service and the work that has interested her in the past several years — private equity, incubation, wealth creation, and now international development. Quihuis is a Stanford-educated petroleum engineer and a venture capitalist, the first in her working-class Mexican-American family to go to college.
As the founding director of the Women’s Technology Cluster, she helped female entrepreneurs raise capital. Now a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford, she is developing a project to foster entrepreneurship with the profits generated by remittance services — patronized by Mexican immigrants who send money home.
At first it might seem an unlikely combination. The 5-year-old Women’s eNews covers a broad range of issues of concern to women worldwide, providing its news stories, cartoons and commentaries to outlets as diverse as the Mercury News, National Public Radio and Fox News. It features cartoonists such as “Sylvia'’ creator Nichole Hollander. Women’s eNews founder Rita Henley Jensen was a former battered woman and welfare mother who went to college and graduate school, and became a senior writer for the National Law Journal before starting the news service.
Quihuis thinks the power of the media can help decision-makers understand issues from a woman’s prism, whether it’s the impact of bankruptcy reform laws on single mothers or the practical impact of health care legislation on children or the elderly. As executive director of the non-profit Women’s Technology Cluster in 1999, she noticed how news reports about the tech incubator for women entrepreneurs accelerated its growth, and attracted venture capitalists amid stiff competition from 700 other business incubators.
Under the radar
And so does the coverage of women who are doing work that is overlooked. Women’s eNews readers recently selected the annual “21 Leaders for the 21st Century'’ awards. (This year it includes winners Mary Lake Pollan, chair of Stanford University’s Obstetrics and Gynecology department and founder of the Eritrean Women’s Project, and Olivia Wang, co-founder of the Habeas Project, which assists battered women to challenge their prison convictions.)
Adding Quihuis, a 2004 21 Leaders recipient, to Women’s eNews’ 13-member board has brought the news service a presence in Silicon Valley that the Manhattan-based organization wanted this year. And it goes the other way.
“I think it’s really important to Bay Area women, Silicon Valley women, to have a connection to New York,'’ she said.
“Like it or not, it is a huge seat of power. There are things we’re trying to do in the valley that can be greatly amplified by reaching out to like-minded individuals.'’