Bechdel Test for Startups?
The leadership at India’s elite startups is mostly a boys’ club.The world’s third-largest startup ecosystem has been churning out tech unicorns at a faster pace than ever before, but this success — just like the tech industry in general — is heavily skewed towards men.
What is Bechdel Test?
In 1985, cartoonist Alison Bechdel coined the term Bechdel Test to measure the lack of female representation on screen. In order to pass this test, any movie or television show must qualify these three things:
- Feature two female characters
- Have those two characters talk to one another
- Have those characters talk to one another about something other than a man
Although the rule is no guarantee of quality or well-developed female characters , it’s long been considered a useful tool for assessing how often entertainment excludes women, and whether they are portrayed as three-dimensional characters whose lives do not revolve entirely around men.
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Avatar, The Social Network, Gravity, Avengers and a million more of the blockbusters are a part of the failing list of this test.
Last month when every company and brand celebrated International Women’s Day and a pretentious diversity rule of stating that they have xyz% of their workforce as women or talking about maternity leaves and all to celebrate women in their organisation. All of this got me thinking — Is this is how we are setting the context of gender equality?
Ok, fine. I buy the point that it’s a step by step process- the journey has at least started.
But, do we really need to celebrate these benchmarks as an achievement where the bigger debate of equality is about equal pay, equal representations and equal opportunities.
According to a McKinsey study on women in the workplace, corporate America has made almost no progress in improving women’s representation over the past four years. The research shows that women are underrepresented at every level.
As per the Global Gender Gap Report 2021 , it will take another 135 years to achieve gender equality based on the current rate of progress (Due to Covid-19 and the fall in women workforce, the time it will take for the gender gap to close grew by 36 years in the space of just 12 months).
This also made me think about our so-called startup circle, primarily in India. If startups come with every definition of breaking the rules “grow fast — build fast — adapt fast” then why do these same old problems still linger in the startup circles as well?
There was no such test for business surroundings. Until now. This week saw a history for the Indian Startup Ecosystem with 5 unicorns getting added to the club- Meesho + Cred + Pharmeasy + Groww + ShareChat.
It’s high time, we talk about this.
A Bechdel Test for Startups
I have tried evaluating the Indian Unicorn Startups with this version of the Bechdel Test. The reason to start with the Unicorn Clubs is the mere logic of them being a role model for the entire fraternity and startup ecosystem in all aspects -
How to build + How to raise funds + How to expand + How to market etc- then why not How to minimize a Workplace Gap?
We are listing 11 Indian Unicorns to test do a basic Bechdel test for them-
Criteria 1 — Leadership/Core Team
The size of top management teams vary a lot, but the minimum number of executives in bigger companies is around 6. As this seems to be the case, I reckon that the number of women on the top management/core team should be at least 2 ( Yeah 2! that’s where the maximum expectation could reach).
Criteria 2 — Job Roles of the above-identified Women
Since women in movies usually talk about men, the second element had to be something women in top management teams usually work with. According to the McKinsey report, women are still more often recruited to head supportive functions than hard business. So, the roles that are not HR, Staff oriented and are P/L Roles.
P.S- I so want to add a criteria for Cap-Table wherein if these women are the founders they should have if not equal 1/3 of founding team equity- but I realise this test will fall apart on just this criteria and sadly we will let this be.)
Here are the results-
