Core to our mission is empowering women in STEM and business, both sectors with intense barriers to their participation. That’s why we support the theme of equity. We put that idea to action through programmes specially designed to uplift women forging innovation.
This 8 March, we’re using the opportunity presented to us by International Women’s Day to highlight why equity is important with a sneak peek of our latest study on women in innovation.
Women are an important source of talent that too often gets turned away from tech and business by both historical inequality and a culture that discourages them from joining. The latest study from Dealroom and Supernovas, an EIT Community initiative to support women business creators, gives us incredible input on how inclusivity unlocks new potential for innovation in Europe and what Europe needs to do to break down the barriers still in place.
Data that drives us forward
Studies already show that women’s perspectives are more important than ever to reduce the biases that are already creeping into future tech sectors like AI. Diversity at the top of a business boosts its financial success over time compared to competitors without that diversity.
That was proven in Dealroom and Supernovas’ latest study, which found that women-founded tech scale-ups in Europe increased their value 6.5x, growing 1.2x faster than the rest of scale-ups over the past five years.
Women have gained ground but still face a hostile playing field
Supernovas’ latest study found that the 2021-2022 period had seen the most venture capital investment in women-founded scale-ups with over USD 9 billion invested over those two years. European investors have been providing the largest share of VC capital for European scale-ups founded by women since 2020.
But there’s still a lot of work to be done to reach a more equitable gender balance. Out of over 7 000 European scale-ups, only 604 (8%) had at least one woman on their founding team. That’s why we continue to make women a central focus of our efforts.
Findings reveal benefits of women in leadership and the barriers to their success
- Women-founded businesses are significantly more likely to focus on sustainability, with nearly one in four women-led scale-ups working to fight climate change
- Women-founded businesses converted a higher percentage of rounds from Seed to Series A (funding during the early stages of their business growth) in a shorter period of time than the European benchmark, but are still disadvantaged in late-stage investment rounds
- There is an especially high growth of women founded scale-ups in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland — they grew 16.6x since 2017
The full Supernovas study will be published 16 May.
