Don’t miss out on talent: improving gender diversity in climate tech
By Tess Dury, Iris ten Have, Fernanda Bartels
It is widely proven that climate change and environmental disasters disproportionately affect women and children, especially in marginalised societies. Furthermore, women have less access to land, financial resources, technology, knowledge and mobility, which hinders their ability and resilience in facing challenges arising from climate change.
It seems clear that those who are most affected by climate change — women and marginalised communities — should be central in the design and implementation of climate responses. This will ensure that these groups are not left behind, and any solutions include the equitable distribution of benefits and outcomes.
Gender diversity is still a problem in all areas of the VC & startup industry, from founders to investment teams. In 2021, 89% of all VC funding in Europe went to male-led startups, 9.3% to mixed teams and just 1.8% to female-led startups. These percentages did not improve from previous years, even with a large increase in VC funding from 2020 to 2021.
At Extantia, we encourage and help our portfolio companies achieve ambitious diversity goals. We also linked three out of six of our impact KPIs to diversity targets at all levels; from company to management boards and supervisory boards. These impact KPIs form the cornerstone of our impact carry policy, where 30% of our carry is tied to portfolio companies reaching set targets over the span of 3 years. Have a look at our EPIC methodology to find out more.
While we’re going in the right direction with our portfolio companies, we’ve identified a problem in our deal flow pipeline. Women are vastly underrepresented as only 10.4% of the companies we see have female CEOs.
Diving deeper into our sub-verticals, the good news is we actually saw a full 50–50 gender balance on CEO level in food waste and above-average gender representation in textiles and buildings renovations.
Our top 5 sub-verticals in terms of female CEOs:
- 50%: food waste
- 38%: textiles
- 33%: renovation of buildings
- 25%: geothermal energy & optimisation/monitoring of industrial processes
- 22%: sustainable fertilisers & bioplastics
However, the low average across the board paints the real picture. Mind you, we only looked at the CEO role, not the other C-level positions.
We want to change this. We are actively exploring different avenues to diversify our pipeline:
👉 Expand our existing networks by actively reaching out to underrepresented groups in climate and VC networks
👉 Partner with organisations that work to support women and non-binary founders
👉 Carry out unconscious bias training with the Extantia team, and potentially roll it out to our portfolio companies
👉 Set specific diversity targets for our pipeline, and start tracking C-level gender diversity. We want to see a 100% increase of female C-level in our pipeline by March 8th 2024!
