Tribe of Mentors: What Happened to All the Women?

Recently, I shared with you all some important lessons I learned from reading Tim Ferriss’s book, Tribe of Mentors. However, as I mentioned in that post, there were also some frustrating things about the book.

I learned a lot of good stuff from it. It helped focus me on the importance of meditation, reading for pleasure, and forming habits. These were all great lessons, but there was one gigantic problem that was impossible to ignore.

You see, there were practically no women in the book.

Thus begins my major frustration with Tim Ferriss generally. First, some details: 98% of the leaders interviewed in this book were men, 98% of Tim’s audience are men, 98% of influential entrepreneurs are men. Okay, okay, only the first one there is technically accurate, but the others sure feel like it sometimes. This book was a massive volume full of a hundred interviews with some of the most successful people out there at the moment, and in the end I couldn’t help but ask, “Where are all the women?” 

To be fair, Tim’s audience is young white boys, so there is a good reason why he probably both interviews these folks and had them in the book. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder what was up. 

And then I started to pay attention. You know all the stuff around mindfulness and how it seems to be everywhere? Well, mindfulness is really just about paying attention. So I started to pay attention, and wouldn’t you know, I noticed something profound. It was all men everywhere, in all the books: the books on original thinkers, and pioneers, and best habit folks, and most successful this and that, and those who have mastered essentialism - left right and center in the dozens of books I was reading were men.  

A skeptical reader might think I was just choosing books written by men for men. Maybe that is part of it, but I was reading the recommended books for entrepreneurs, business-building, startups, and other non-fiction types. Yes, I came across some books by women, but interestingly enough, many of them had largely male examples, too. 

I’m in the tech world now, and the lack of women in the tech world is particularly noticeable. Sure, there are some remarkably competent and successful women, but the imbalance is stark. As Forbes recently pointed out, the number of women in tech is growing, but not fast enough to fix the imbalance. Women are outnumbered by men in university-level computer science courses, 17% to 82%. Biases that influence how women are perceived in tech make things worse once they’re out in the workforce. As the Dreamhost blog pointed out in its 2019 State of Women in Tech post, “In a study of GitHub users, code written by women was accepted 78.6 percent of the time — 4 percent more than code written by men. This trend, however, only worked when the coder’s gender was kept secret.” We’re climbing a pretty steep mountain, here.

This isn’t just a problem in the tech world, though. Forbes Magazine recently put out a list of its Top 100 Most Innovative Leaders. Guess how many women were on it? One. It’s a systemic problem.

So my final conclusion after reading Tribe of Mentors and paying attention to the world around me was this: we need more women leaders, and I needed to step up to help fill that role. I needed to meditate regularly, read all the time, be a woman who sets an example, and support other women so they can do the same. 

Or in other words, build Myrth, create supportive environments for women - by both men and women - and do it now.