An analysis by openthebox and Agoria of 300 Belgian start-ups shows that female founders and directors are still rare in the sector, despite all efforts. Only 10% of founders and a meager 13% of directors are women. However, the number of female employees at the start-ups and scale-ups surveyed did increase slightly over the past 10 years, from 33% to 36%.
The trend in Belgium does not differ from that in the Netherlands; there, too, women are still far outnumbered, especially in high-tech start-ups. Technology federation Agoria is working to break the status quo by paying more attention to the composition of start-up teams and by actively encouraging investors to delegate female representatives to the boards of directors of their portfolio companies.
On the occasion of International Girls in ICT Day, openthebox, a website that uses AI technology to collect company data and expose entrepreneurial networks, and the sector federation Agoria delved into the company data of some 300 Belgian technology start-ups and scale-ups. These were companies participating in acceleration programs such as imec.istart, Start It KBC, and Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 program. The male-female ratios of founders, directors, and employees were examined, focusing on companies founded between 2011 and 2022. The data shows that the proportion of female founders at startups founded between 2017 and 2022 increased slightly from 8 to 10 percent of the total number of founders compared to startups founded between 2011 and 2016.
“Despite industry efforts over the past two decades, there are still few female founders at start-ups,” said Steve Deplacie, Managing Director of openthebox. “The same goes for female directors, where the percentage has even dropped from 15% to 13%. The number of female employees remains almost stable, at about one in three. So on all fronts, there is still solid room for improvement regarding female representation.”
Of all the companies surveyed, 79% have only male founders, while only 3% have only female founders. When it comes to directors, there is also a lot of margins to become more diverse: 71% of companies have only male directors, while 26% of companies have at least one female director in addition to a male director.
Additional research on about 70 start-ups with a female founder shows that 85% of these companies also have at least one male co-founder. These companies total 83 female founders and 129 male founders.
“Female founders do not necessarily recruit more female employees,” adds Laurence Jacobs, Women in Tech Ambassador at Agoria. “Women remain significantly underrepresented with a share of about 30%. Boards from this group of companies contain about 32% female board members.”
Agoria’s sustainability strategy, “Technology for a better world”, therefore sets clear goals regarding gender ratios within technology companies, such as striving to improve the male/female ratio annually, achieving gender parity in hiring and promotions, and having at least 25% women in leadership positions by 2030.
Breaking the status quo
Agoria also sees a positive role for accelerators and investment funds to break the status quo. On the one hand, they can take gender diversity into account when guiding startups looking for co-founders for their projects. “Several international studies show that companies with female founders and executives perform better in terms of efficiency, return on investment, and operating profits,” said Agoria’s Laurence Jacobs. “They achieve better ESG scores and invest more in employee training and development. It should just be common sense to focus on gender diversity.”
On the other hand, both public and private investment funds can pay more attention to the composition of their boards when they appoint representatives. Studies show that teams composed of people of different genders, multicultural backgrounds, and ages make better decisions. While complementarity of profiles is often paramount in the composition of advisory boards, this seems to be much less the case with boards of directors.
In addition, several testimonies indicate that the trajectory of women entrepreneurs is considerably more difficult, and they often face stereotypes.
Recently, Bien Vanderstappen, co-founder and CEO TEO, was one of the finalists in a competition for women entrepreneurs. “I was told that it was exceptional that I had ambitiously built a growth company with a male associate who was not my life partner. In addition, it was noted that as a woman active in a technical field with mainly industry clients, I was not an ideal role model and that women would find it difficult to identify with me. Such things are a bit of a shock, especially anno 2023, where gender and background should really no longer play a role in valuing one’s work.”
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