GENDER DIVERSITY in private equity and venture capital in SPAIN
an original research project by Nina Capital and Level 20
SEPTEMBER 2021
by the Nina Capital team
TL/DNR — Nina Capital and Level 20 are delighted to publish our findings on Gender diversity in the Spanish Private Equity and Venture Capital industry.
To secure a copy of the Report: download it from the Level 20 website or contact us at diversity@nina.capital.
Diversity in its broadest sense is a core value at Nina Capital. We value it not just across categories like gender, age, or ethnicity, but also in our experiences, education, social and cultural backgrounds, strengths, and thinking. We have baked this value into our everyday behaviors as a team. We track it in the companies we evaluate for investment, and those that join our portfolio. We have made it the topic of one of our first internal research projects, with our ‘19 intern and ’20 fellow Adriano as its project lead.
We do all of this because we believe that diversity matters, in very measurable and tangible ways.
The relationship between diversity and business performance is real — there is statistically significant correlation between a more diverse leadership team and financial outperformance [1]. Most of the existing, growing body of research has focused on gender as a dimension of diversity, and it shows that increased diversity and a more inclusive workforce can be attributes of strong business outcomes — including, higher returns and lower return volatility for companies with high gender diversity, relative to sector peers [2].
Not only individual firms perform better when they are diverse — so do entire industries.
Ample research has already shown that industries that neglect true progress towards gender diversity are missing out on a major opportunity to make themselves stronger.
For this reason and as part of our team-wide commitment to diversity, since February 2021 our founder and managing partner Marta-Gaia Zanchi volunteers on the Spanish Committee of Level 20, a not-for-profit organization founded in 2015 by 12 women working in senior roles in private equity, aligned around a common vision of improving gender diversity in the industry.
Early in her new assignment, Marta-Gaia was surprised to learn that no one had the answer to her question — what is the percentage of women in the Private Equity and Venture Capital (PE/VC) industry in Spain?
We at Nina Capital believe that progress starts with understanding.
When we realized that no one had made the effort to understand the true state of gender diversity in our industry in Spain, we decided to take action — in collaboration with Level 20 and with the support of its many great partners.
Towards this goal, we recruited two amazing student interns, Marta Munte (Stanford University) and Nicole Van Allen (IESE Business School). Under the guidance of Marta-Gaia and Yahel Halamish, Nina’s Head of Investor Relations and Diversity & Inclusion Officer, the newly formed team set out to scope the project that would ultimately answer this question by looking at actual industry data, collecting and analyzing firm and employee data at the most granular level.
In the process, we realized early that no one had carried out similar work in the past; the only precedent with a similar intent was a large-scale, voluntary survey in the United Kingdom [3].
As this is the first study of its kind for Spanish PE/VC, we had to develop a methodology for it.
To measure and understand the state of gender diversity in the Spanish PE/VC industry, we collected and analyzed data on 209 PE/VC firms and their 2,127 employees with an office presence in Spain. The data sources used for this analysis include Nina Capital’s own proprietary database, along with data generously donated by ASCRI, Invest Europe, EQT Group, and Preqin. The study revealed, for the first time, the severity of the gender diversity issue in Spanish PE/VC and can be used as a baseline for improvement.
Today, we are proud to share our methodology and results broadly.
To secure your copy of our Whitepaper, you can either
- visit the Research section of the Level 20 website at https://www.level20.org/what-we-do/research
- contact us at diversity@nina.capital
What can you expect to find in the report?
We found, unsurprisingly, that women are underrepresented in the Spanish PE/VC industry. In aggregate, women represent 30% of the workforce. Only 17% of senior roles positions are held by women. When we looked at senior investment roles, we found that only 14% of positions are held by women. There is a higher percentage of women at the mid and junior level, with 36% of the mid-level roles and 44% of the junior roles.
When comparing the percentage of investment roles held by women in PE versus VC, we see that women in VC hold a slightly higher percentage of senior investment roles relative to PE (15% versus 12%, respectively). In addition, there is a noticeable difference between PE and VC at the mid level. While women in VC hold 32% of mid level investment positions, women in PE hold only 18% of mid level investment positions.
Although the overall numbers paint a picture of an industry dominated by men, there are pockets within the industry where gender diversity is prevalent. For example, we found in the data that bigger teams are often more gender diverse than smaller ones. In addition, we learned that the firms specializing in more gender diverse sectors, such as the life sciences, tend to be more gender diverse themselves.
In parallel with this effort, we also conducted qualitative interviews with representatives of the industry.
When speaking with our interviewees, both men and women at various levels of seniority, they cited several reasons for this underrepresentation, including lack of awareness of the existence of the PE/VC industry and its career paths amongst young people; misperceptions about the industry amongst those who are aware; a homogenous, male-dominated candidate pool (which we speculate is, at least in part, a consequence of the former); and perhaps also, gender biases embedded in the culture and hiring practices of firms. We found that the difficulties exist not only in recruiting women into the industry, but also in retaining and advancing women to senior roles.
Our interviewees have offered a series of recommendations to help reduce the gender gap in our industry, including:
- engage in recruitment efforts towards a more diverse candidate pool;
- foster a culture of inclusion within firms for the retention of female talent;
- invest in the entrepreneurial ecosystem chain to create future female candidates;
- create and disseminate policies for adoption by investment firms.
As for us at Nina Capital, our main objective is that this work provides a methodology for improving gender diversity in Spanish PE/VC.
We offer these first results just as a starting point. Our recommendation to the industry is that this work continues. We encourage other participants, across Europe and beyond, to invest in the collection of high quality, relevant data to provide insights and the basis for continually measuring gender diversity. In this way, we will be able to prospectively measure the effectiveness of specific actions and track the industry’s progress to see if the actions taken are indeed positively influencing a forward path towards gender diversity.
We hope that when this study is repeated, it will show progress towards a more gender diverse industry, not just overall but at every sub-segment and role category in the industry.
Similarly, we also recommend firms to gather their own data regularly on recruitment, promotion and retention, as well as to set themselves some Key Performance Indicators (KPI); to ensure their policies are concrete and that the results of the policies are measurable, which we believe is the first requirement for improving gender diversity in Spanish PE/VC .
This is the first study that has gathered data on the gender diversity issue in the Spanish PE/VC industry.
We view this report, summarizing the current situation of gender diversity in Spanish PE/VC for the first time, as the initial step in the conversation about where we are headed in the industry and what is the ideal state of gender diversity that we should aim to achieve.
Nina Capital is a specialized venture capital firm investing exclusively at the intersection of healthcare and technology. From our home base in Barcelona, Spain, we provide early-stage capital for founders across Europe, North America, and Israel. Early stage means, for us, entry-point checks at the preseed and seed stage. We are inspired by a vision for the future in which data, computing, networks, and other digital and deep technologies deliver meaningful clinical and value outcomes for healthcare participants. In our investment criteria and process, we are informed by a Stanford-born methodology of health technology innovation known as Biodesign. Since 2001, Biodesign has proven to de-risk the process of new venture creation by applying a need-driven and value-based approach to reinventing healthcare with the help of technology. For more information, visit www.nina.capital or contact: info@nina.capital.
Level 20 is a not for profit organisation founded in 2015 by 12 women working in senior roles in private equity, aligned around a common vision of improving gender diversity in the industry. We aim to inspire women to join and succeed in this dynamic industry by creating opportunities for them to interact and learn from the insights and experience of others. Our vision is underpinned by a focus on four key initiatives: mentoring and development; networking and events; outreach and advocacy; and research. For more information, visit www.level20.org or contact: office@level20.org.
Reference list:
- [1] Delivering through Diversity, McKinsey 2018
- [2] Morgan Stanley, The Gender Advantage 2016
- [3] Level 20 & BVCA Launch the Latest Diversity & Inclusion Survey 2021
