SV Founders Report (1/5): How Big is the Gender Gap in the Startup World?
By Siddharth Choksi, Marketing Analyst at Samaipata Ventures. We analysed roughly 200 founders across Europe who exited for, or raised rounds above $50M in the past decade, not for their financial success, but the technological disruption they caused. We analysed over 15 different variables, here are some of our key findings.
There’s no point beating around the bush, so let’s just get straight to the point: the European start-up ecosystem is unbelievably male-centric, and that’s unacceptable. Come on, it’s 2017!
To the vast majority of the startup community this won’t exactly come as a surprise, however, the extent to which is without question rather eye-opening:
A whopping 95% of the European success stories of the past decade or so have a male-only founding team. In addition to the analysis of the European Ecosystem, we thought it’d be interesting to do a complementary analysis on the founders of some of the unicorns of the past decade. What came from this side-by-side analysis is beyond me: just 2% of the founders of the ‘crème de la crème’ of the global startup ecosystem are female.
Female entrepreneurs only represent 10% of the digital startups in France… there’s a phenomenon of self-censorship among women… Female role models are crucial to encourage women to engage and to undertake in the area of innovation! — Samantha Jérusalmy, Elaia Partners
Interestingly, TechCrunch did a similar study and found that of the 43,003 companies that received funding in the past 8 years, only 6,791 had a female co-founder; thats less than 16%.
When we compare these figures with our own analysis, we come to realise that the majority of startups with a female co-founder are in the lower stages of funding, which means: as you go to higher funding stages (Seed → Series A → Series B → ...), the greater the gender gap becomes.
We strongly and heartedly believe in the importance of having a female co-founder. Back in 2015, Quantopian (a Boston-based trading platform) concluded that in fact women-led companies have a track-record of performing 3x better than the S&P 500!
The gender diversity problem is pervasive and backed by loads of data. Last year, over 80% of startups who raised capital had all-male founding teams. — Carolina Brochado, Atomico
Last year, we had a little over 4000 startups in our fund’s deal-flow, in which the gender ratio seemed to be moving in a much better direction! There’s no doubt that there’s still a long way to go, but we’re hopeful for future! It’s detrimental for the global startup community to break gender barriers and see more and more gender diversity in the Silicon Valleys of the world! 💪
This post is part of a series comprising of 5 articles, in which we will be discussing and presenting our most astonishing findings after thorough research on nearly 200 founders.
- SV Founders Report (1/5): How Big is the Gender Gap in the Startup World?
- SV Founders Report (2/5): How Educated are European Startup Founders?
- SV Founders Report (3/5): A dive into Europe’s diverse startup ecosystem
- SV Founders Report (4/5): What Successful Founders did before Making it.
- SV Founders Report (5/5): A Look into a Startup’s Timeline.
Feel free to leave us any comments/feedback, they are always welcome!
