Tech start-ups founded by women hire more women
more than Google, which has 31% women, Facebook (33%) and Apple (32%).
The survey found executive leadership and engineering teams at femalefounded start-ups are comprised of more than twice the number of women than at startups with no female founders. Also, firms with female founders have, on average, one female founder and one male founder.
The results underscore research that shows women in leadership positions are crucial for the advancement of other women. It’s also a signal that more women are pursuing entrepreneurial paths and that young companies may be becoming more open to recruiting diverse workforces in an industry widely criticized for being a boys club and for having a widening gender gap. “The magnitude was surprising for us,” Alex Mittal, CEO and co-founder of FundersClub, an online venture capital firm, told USA TODAY. Of the 234 start-ups in FundersClub’s portfolio, 85 responded to an anonymous survey.
Though the survey shows progress, the status quo remains. In 2017, 17% of start-ups had a female founder, according to a recent CrunchBase study. That number has been flat five years, even though women make up nearly half of the U.S. workforce and are majority owners of 36% of small businesses. Still, diversity experts say they are seeing some start-ups taking steps to recruit more women and people of color.
Chiara McPhee and Jen Kessler’s start-up Bizzy was the first to graduate from incubator Y Combinator with two female founders. They didn’t set out to hire women, but women gravitated to them, they said. On average, half the staff at the email marketing firm were women. “Female applicants were really excited about the idea of having two female founders,” Kessler said. “And it always came up in the first call.”
Ellen Pao, an investment partner at Kapor Capital and the chief diversity and inclusion officer at the Kapor Center for Social Impact who unsuccessfully sued her former venture capital firm for gender discrimination, says her own experience bears this out.
“As an executive and then CEO of Reddit, I saw that I could hire women and people of color who were more qualified and more excited about their roles,” Pao said in a statement to USA TODAY. “I have no doubt it was in part because I am a woman of color.”
“I saw that I could hire women and people of color who were more qualified and more excited about their roles.”