Reimagining Leadership and Capital in the Post-Pandemic World

GBF Ambassador Surya Narayanan shares her reflections and takeaways from Women’s History Month/ IWD 2022 Roundtable

I grew up in India in communities where people are ardent fans of cricket. During my time there, I often witnessed conversations about famous batsman Sachin Tendulkar hitting a century, or famous cricket bowler Harbhajan Singh getting his wicket in the last over. But I never heard people speak about Women’s Cricket. When I moved to the United States, I was shocked and surprised to see that things are not different in the developed and powerful nations. These biases are not only in sports but across all sectors of the industry.

Painful statistics to ponder:

• According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women make up to 67% of workers earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25. In contrast, only 8% of CEOs are at Fortune 500 firms.
• Women professionals make only 80% of what men make for the same role.
• Only 29% of women from across the globe are in senior leadership positions across different industries.[All Raise]
• VC money that flows into women-led startups has stubbornly remained at around 2% for the past 14 years.[Robert Smith]
• On the other hand, the general statistics on gender lens investing suggest that companies with a female founder deliver a higher rate of return (112% vs 48%) than all-male founded teams and a lower risk of failure.

Decisions made with biases impede the growth of the organization in several ways. The COVID-19 crisis has further intensified these effects, and there is a need to rethink what makes a good leader who can create an organizational impact on the society and environment.

To address the gap in gender-based leadership and capital, the Global Bio Fund (GBF) organized its roundtable discussion on Reimagining Leadership and Capital during the post-pandemic world” on International Women’s Day (March 8th) this year. The discussion panel brought together women Tech leaders, investors, and entrepreneurs from across the globe which included Dr. Andrew Kelly (who pioneered Australasia’s specialist life sciences fund, Executive Director of BioPacific Partners, also in our Global Advisors Network), Dr. Claire Thompson (CEO of Agility Life Sciences, award-winning pharmaceutical scientist, strategist, and storyteller) and Monique Aiken (Co-founder of Make Justice Normal, ReStarter Fund and the past host of the podcast ‘The Reconstruction’, at ImpactAlpha where she is a Contributing Editor). The objective of the discussion centered around leadership and Capital. Dr. Ipshita Mandal-Johnson, the founding partner, and the CEO of the GBF moderated the discussion. The discussion kickstarted with an interesting question to the panelists — “What radicalizes you, what is the turning point in your life that made you think about leadership?”

What radicalizes you?

Our circumstances and situation often dictate our thinking process. For our panelists, Monique Aiken, there were several of those right from her graduate career to her professional life in finance and justice. Being the only black woman, she often witnessed racial disparity, sexism, and inequality during her journey of 15 years in the finance career, which radicalized her to fight for justice. During her presentation, she pointed out several interesting facts. One of them that was personally very thought-provoking was that even today big pharma giants invest in curing chronic diseases such as erectile dysfunction, while life-threatening conditions such as endometriosis are often sidelined. While addressing gender inequalities, it is necessary to actively work towards achieving a balance, not just believe the cause.

Our panelist Dr. Andrew Kelly is a great example. As a former VC investor (currently leading BioPacific Partners), Andrew observed the marginalization of smart women in both businesses and finance which radicalized him. So, he focused on sharing power when building teams.

Dr. Claire Thompson, our third panelist who calls herself a “Caption Extrovert Optimist” focused on ‘people and purpose’ rather than ‘products and profits’, while she built her company. Like many other women, Claire experienced sexism while playing a football game, which radicalized her. To address this issue, she decided to coach football to her daughter and others, so young girls like her daughter can build confidence while the male counterparts can learn how to be advocates like Andrew.

Is Capital a proxy for Power?

A question that came up from these thoughts was — Talking about bias and the need for a different leadership style, it is seen that money and capital drive a lot of change, so how can we see the role of financial institutions and venture capitals to bring some of these changes?

Monique pointed out that ‘Capital is a proxy for power who gets to administer, distribute it, and decide things about it’. While we often think that risk is abstract and potentially a financial market output, it is not! Risk is cultural and often viewed with a bias. So, we need to raise the floor and not just the ceiling’. ‘There is a need to make a generational change where we need to understand the bias that occurs on the daily basis that permeates the capital and capital power’, Andrew added. Claire suggested that the financial institutions and ventures capitals should invest in culture and the leaders who can create an environment for the people focused on purpose. That way, not only the teams will succeed, but the investors can reap the rewards.

How can capital make leadership inclusive?

The insights on leadership and capital sparked interest amongst the audience, especially on the aspects of inclusion — ‘How does capital bring in a lot of roles in bringing in inclusive leadership?’ Our society is made of different cultures, genders, ethnicity, and religion. GBF Vice- Chair Peder Holk Nielsen contributed to this conversation through his experience in building Novozymes. His team collectively bypassed the cultural biases and included the societies that they were a part of. They further worked on modifying the training programs to build leaders and managers, so that he and his team were able to increase the number of women executives from 6% to 40% in 3 years.

Can we break the barriers?

Two interesting questions popped up during this conversation — Why do we focus on female entrepreneurship while we promote the idea of inclusion? One of our audience, Anna Campbell, also had an interesting question for the panelists– ‘How do we break barriers in terms of getting greater representation within the capital investment communities at the decision-making level?’

Our panelist, Monique pointed out the bottleneck in our pipeline. The investment banks that feed the private equity and venture capital funds are inhospitable for women. So, there is a need to address the issue in the system to be able to break the barriers. Nina Le Lievre, one of our audiences, added that our unconscious biases also contribute to the challenges. ‘While inclusion is important, the current focus on female entrepreneurship is based on logical thinking and the current situation, where the equally talented female entrepreneurs are under-supported in the capital’, Andrew added. Claire emphasized that the political systems and traditional social systems should not be allowed to overpower the decision-making process while promoting female leaders. The discussion ended with several key takeaways that each of us should reflect on and work together to make a change that we want to see!

Key Takeaways:

• Investments should be focused on the culture — Dr Claire Thompson
• One should understand the direction of the flow of power to make decisions with different conclusions — Dr Andrew Kelly
• We all need to go along the future and short the past and that can start today — Monique Aiken