Technology Moves Fast — Diversity Not So Much
By Anne Christin Braun
Diversity is a good idea — luckily most people don’t argue that anymore. It’s crucial not just because it should be a no-brainer that everyone has the same chances and rights in 2019, but because it’s an economic necessity.
Companies have to staff an increasing amount of tech jobs and are already struggling with this task today because of the lacking (female) workforce. Looking at the startup side of things, research has shown, that businesses with mixed founding teams generated on average 10% more in revenue as well as diverse teams have found to be more effective. Moreover, women drive between 70–80% of consumer decisions, that means if products and services are designed in a way that is more attractive for men, a business might lose a lot of potential.
Looking at these facts it’s no good news that only 15,1% of founders are female in Germany. This is what a recent study by Bundesverband Deutsche Startups and Google for Startups, the Female Founders Monitor 2019, found when analyzing 3.747 founders in 1.547 startups.
Taking a closer look at the study it immediately becomes clear, that there are a number of differences between female and male founders in Germany. One of them is what drives them to start a business. While almost half of the female founders state social motives compared to 36,4% of male founders, a vast majority of 74,9% of male founders state economic reasons while only 58,4% of female founders do.
Furthermore only 8,3% of female teams work in tech while 35,8% of male teams do. This gap goes hand in hand with the low numbers of women who have a university degree in tech. Another striking difference is the primary sources of funding for the individual teams. While female as well as male teams use primarily own savings to build their ventures, male teams use external sources like Business Angels, VC money and public funds a lot more often than female teams, who primarily seek financial support from family and friends. While female teams tend to strive more for stability than growth this probably isn’t a mere question of will or choice since 93% of capital invested in European companies in 2018 went to all-male founding teams.
Here at ZOLLHOF we are a pretty well-balanced and diverse core team, however if we look at our inhouse startups we only have one female founder on board — Alex from MatchManao. Needless to say, we are ready to contribute to challenging and changing this status quo. Because visibility of women within the digital sphere is limited, yet crucial for other women to follow, this is one of our main focus aspects: Make women in tech be heard and seen. For us this means putting women forward whenever we have a chance. In 2018 we had 25% female experts speak at our ZOLLHOF events, so far we were able to increase this percentage to 50% for our events in 2019.
While this is a great step, there are many more that need to follow in order to eventually raise the number of female founders, too. Having discussed the impact of female role models in digital ecosystems in a great panel with Aya Jaff, Kim Parsons and Alex Kropielnicka back in February, we learned that female teachers in MINT subjects can make a difference in student’s choices for their classes. But we didn’t only listen and learn. We thought it would be a great thing to be able to offer a coding workshop for newbies that is ideally led by female coaches, so it hopefully attracts a lot of future female coding talents as well. Thanks to the four awesome coding wizards Eva, Klara, Sara and Nico we will do just that in a two-day frontend coding workshop on July 29/30 here at ZOLLHOF. Applications are now open until June 5, so if you’ve always wanted to be able to build your own website but something held you back, we definitely want to hear from you!
Knowing that it will be an ongoing journey, we are ready to roll up our sleeves and contribute to a more diverse digital ecosystem in and around ZOLLHOF. If you have ideas, input or feedback on this, I’d love to hear from you. Shoot me a line at acb@zollhof.de or find me on LinkedIn.
Anne is ZOLLHOF’s Senior Marketing Manager. She has many years of experience in tech communications and PR. When she’s not at ZOLLHOF, Anne is working on her Master’s degree in Health Sciences and supports an NGO as their Social Media Manager.
