Welcome to the Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace and success.

I'm Ashley Milne Tite. This time on the show, we look at life for women in the world's technology capital, Silicon Valley.

For women who want to get funding for their companies, the relationship with an investor can sometimes get tricky.

They get into one-on-one situations with the VC

and instead of it being a conventional conversation about a term sheet,

it's a conversation about, well, what else can you give me in a sort of more sexual way?

And what's it like working for one of those huge, well-known tech firms

where the gender ratio is somewhat skewed?

The team that I'm on, actually, we have a fair number of women programmers.

But even then, I mean, I definitely have had the experience of I say something and it's just not believed until it's repeated by a guy.

But there are plenty of good things about it too, coming up.

I'm producing this episode of the broad experience in partnership with the Financial Times.

It's the second of three podcasts I'm doing with them.

And my first guest this week is the FTs San Francisco correspondent Hannah Kussela.

She covers social media and cybersecurity, and she's also done a lot of reporting about women in Silicon Valley.

This, after all, is the center of the tech world.

It's where Apple was born and still lives. It's where Facebook, Google, and thousands of

startups are all located. Hannah moved to this beat from London about a year ago, and she's found

the culture in the valley quite a change from cynical Britain. Everyone's so positive about everything she says.

And if you read the entrepreneurial press, you'll know even failure gets a good rap these days.

But one thing Hannah can't see in a positive light is how few women seem to thrive on the tech scene.

A tiny minority of tech startups are run by women.

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