Frankly … posthuman  “Tech for Good” but make it female

The German economy is still heavily male-dominated. But work is being done at many levels to increase the presence of women.

The women’s quota is here. At last. In future, the boardrooms of listed companies will have to become more female. To be specific: if there are more than three members of the management board, at least one of them must be a woman. Companies have not succeeded in promoting more women to senior roles with the voluntary system. That’s why the quota has been introduced, because it’s effective: there’s already been a mandatory female quota of 30 per cent since 2016 for supervisory boards. For this reason, supporters of the quota now consider this impact on management – significant though it is – to be politically justified.

How female is the startup sector?

Personally I can only welcome this decision. I find that I am also represented far too sparsely elsewhere in the workplace, including outside female supervisory and management boards. For instance let’s take a look at the startup sector: in that environment, as a female startup founder – with a migration background – I’m clearly in the minority. Of everyone who has founded a startup in Germany, only around 16 per cent are women. This was the conclusion reached by the German Startups Association in its Female Founders Monitor 2020. This number has not changed much over the past few years. And this trend continues in venture capital too. The imbalance is clear from the funding total received by female founders so far: just 5.2 per cent of teams made up of women have already accumulated a million euros or more – that sum stands at 27.8 per cent for male teams.
 
As well as the quota, a modern family and education policy would certainly be a great additional support. But because this will probably be a long time coming, some people are already experimenting with alternative interim solutions. New approaches such as venture capital funds in which only women invest, or training programmes aimed solely at women, give me hope that we can balance up the situation a little – even without a quota – despite the fact that some of these strategies appear radical at first glance.

Startups by and for women

I’d like to introduce one of these programmes briefly: the global F-Lane Accelerator programme offered by the Vodafone Institute for Society and Communications. The programme maximises potential for startup companies founded by and for women. Because of the pandemic, the Vodafone Institute ran the Female Accelerator F-Lane entirely as a virtual programme in 2020 – with more than 130 international mentors (male and female) supporting the startups with over 440 hours of programme content. From apps offering advice to women who are victims of domestic violence in Brazil, or safe lift-sharing arrangements for women in Pakistan, to online platforms for women’s health in the United Arab Emirates – the women participating in the programme have drawn inspiration from problems encountered in their own personal background.
 
Strong partners like Yunus Social Business and Impact Hub Berlin bring along a wealth of expertise and good contacts to support these startups as effectively as possible. “Just because our investment strategy is impact-first doesn’t mean that we aren’t interested in profit. We aim to ensure that our social startups are sustainable and can survive later on even without external support,” says Saskia Bruysten, co-founder and CEO of Yunus Social Business.

Gender Lens Investing

F-Lane has formulated its goals clearly on the website: they want more female representation in the tech world, they want to utilise technology as a force of social change, and finally they want to close the gender investment gap. “We don’t want to encourage female founders to behave like men, we want to support them in winning over investors with a really good story and implementing their business idea successfully,” says Inger Paus, Managing Director of the Vodafone Institute.
 
F-Lane’s approach of not being oriented to traditional criteria like cashflow analysis or credit ratings, but instead involving additional data relating to gender distribution in a country, company or business sector – also known as Gender Lens Investing – is a trend that’s here to stay, and which is being recognised by an increasing number of investors (of both genders). I’d be delighted if we saw more of this in 2021, and I had the chance to work with an increasing number of female colleagues – with or without a quota.
 

January 2021