Summer21: how did we fare on our diversity indicators?

At the end of last year, we delved into the stats for our Summer21 Accelerator intake process to better understand how we are tracking on attracting diverse and under-represented candidates for our program. Apart from gender diversity, this was the first time we had actively asked applicants to identify with other intersectional indicators, like sexual orientation, disability, the refugee/first-generation Australian experience and First Nations Australian, Maori and Pasifika heritage.

Startmate Summer21 Accelerator cohort officially kicked off last week, so we wanted to provide an update on how these diversity measures looked at each stage through the selection process, down to the final cohort.

The breakdown

Gender representation

For the first time in Startmate’s history, we achieved gender parity through the application process, with 50% of all eligible applications having a co/founder who identified as a woman. Even more exciting is the fact that this gender split held strong at the longlist phase, where teams were brought in for the lightning round mentor roulette process. For our in-depth interview days, the percentage of teams with women cofounders dropped slightly to 45% (14 of 31 teams), which ultimately resulted in a cohort of 8 teams out of 18 having a cofounder who identifies as a woman — an end result of 44% women-cofounded teams.

First-generation migrant/refugee entrepreneurs

One diversity measure we tracked for the first time was those founders who identify as being a first-generation Australia, or who have arrived here as a refugee. In total, 30% of the total applicant companies had a cofounder with refugee or first-generation migrant experience. The total proportion of teams with first-generation Australians rose slightly to 40% at the mentor roulette round and held steady through the long-form interview process, resulting in a cohort where 33% of the teams have a cofounder who identifies as a refugee or first-generation migrant.

Sexual orientation

Just over 10% of applicants, or 53 companies, identified as having an LGBTQ founder. While only two companies progressed through the mentor roulette and interview day rounds (5% and 3% of total companies respectively), the final cohort has no confirmed LGBTQ representation.

With ~3% of the total adult population of Australia identifying as LGBTQ, and a similar proportion in New Zealand, this end result does not feel representative of our broader community.

First Nations Australian and Maori & Pasifika identification

For the first time, we also tracked the representation of First Nations Australians, Maori and Pasifika people through the selection process. The numbers are presented here in aggregate. 3% of the total applicant pool identified as First Nations Australian, Maori or Pasifika — a percentage which actually increased through the selection process. Two teams with founders of Maori background progressed through each stage of the process to be selected as part of Summer21, representing 11% of the final cohort.

While this overall is an outcome we are proud of, these numbers are still not reflective of the total population — with ~3% of the Australian population identifying as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander, and upwards of 25% of the New Zealand population identifying as indigenous Maori or Pasifika.

People with a disability

While 13 teams identified as having a founder with a disability at the application stage, none of these teams progressed through the later stages of the process. While 20% of the Australian population has a disability, more than a quarter have profound or severe core-activity limitations. As a startup community, we definitely need to do more to understand what good looks like with respect to inclusion and belonging for people with a disability, and acknowledge the work Remarkable does to actively support entrepreneurs in this area.

Other thoughts on the process

While tracking these intersectional diversity indicators gives us a baseline from which to measure progress moving forward, at Startmate we are more focused on inputs than outputs. What we can control is how well we are engaging with and including members of the startup ecosystem who represent diverse backgrounds, and how we design the process that ensures access and equity all the way through.

For our Accelerator, besides our outreach efforts across the community, this relates to our selection process and those actually involved in it — our mentors and investors. At this stage, we only have gender-specific data on our mentor group, but will be endeavouring to collect parallel information for future processes. From this vantage point, the gender balance of our mentor selection panel was 25% women, 75% men — well below the standard of gender balance we are aiming for everywhere else. We will cover more on how we are thinking of addressing these issues both practically and systemically in a future post.

The early building blocks of equitable design

“There is no neutral design. There is only design that promotes and reentrenches inequity and discrimination , and design that designs against it.”

— Aubrey Blanche, Director of Equitable Design & Impact @ CultureAmp for Liminal* June 2020

I am personally hugely inspired by the deep inquiry into themes of diversity, inclusion, equity and belonging that Culture Amp’s Director of Equitable Design, Aubrey Blanche, has undertaken over the better part of her career, and will be taking cues from this work as we think about Startmate’s approach to diversity. As I mentioned earlier, we are input-focused and believe this is the best way to achieve outcomes we can all be proud of. Over the course of this year, we will be introducing similar tracking measures across all of our programs and events to monitor the baseline from which we want to improve, and identifying the systemic issues and design flaws that result in less than optimal outcomes.

This is a work in progress for all of us, but our whole team, and by extension our whole community, is both aligned on the future we want to create, and invested in the process to get there. By ‘building in public’, we want to hold ourselves accountable, as well as invite different perspectives to the the table.

Thanks for coming on this journey with us.