Female Representation in Startups

Notion Capital recently published a study on the gender divide at work with B2B software companies that have over $1BN in valuation in Europe and North America which we are fascinated by. Here are some quick results: 

• The more female leaders there are in the company, the longer the female leaders will stay in their roles.
• Similarly, the more female leaders there are, the more female staff there are and the more female staff will increase. 
• Only 1 in 5 B2B software unicorns had female representation in their leadership.
• U.S. companies that offer paid maternity leave prompt female leaders to stay longer in a company.

Tala CEO Shivani Siroya, credit: Tala 

• Tala is a small-business intermediary founded in 2010 by Shivani Siroya that aims to give financial access to underserved customers in East Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. 
• Modere is a consumer products E-commerce company that focuses on designing clean and environmentally conscious personal health and wellness products. The company is currently led by Asma Ishaq, who was promoted to CEO internally in 2018. 
• Guild Education is a B-corporation education tech company and was founded by Rachel Romer Clarson and Brittany Stich. The company’s mission is to bridge the gap between working adults without higher education while also helping employers increase employee retention by offering tuition benefits. 
• Verge Genomics is a biotechnology company aiming to develop next-generation medicines from human genomics targeting neurodegenerative diseases such as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson’s Disease, and Alzheimer’s. The company is co-founded and led by Alice Zhang. 
• Confluent is an event streaming platform that enables companies to easily access data as real-time streams using the software platform Apache Kafka. The company was co-founded by Neha Narkhede together with her previous LinkedIn colleagues Jay Kreps and Jun Rao.