Tech Startups With At Least One Female Founder Twice As Likely To Hire Women, Study Says

U.S. tech startups that include at least one female founding member are twice as likely to hire on more women in comparison to all-male founding teams and all of the top Fortune 500 tech giants.

A new survey released this week from the tech investment firm FundersClub finds that although there remains a very wide gender gap in Silicon Valley companies, those which start out with female founders are far more likely to continue the trend of hiring on women as their company grows.

The FundersClub client list includes 234 technology startups across the U.S., although the majority have their headquarters based in Silicon Valley. This year’s diversity survey focused on 85 U.S.-based tech startups and primarily honed in on gender data in smaller companies that have fewer than 20 full-time employees.

Read: Uber Fires 20 Employees Over Sexual Harassment Claims

Startups with at least one female founder showed a nearly 50/50 split between male and female employees, with an average rate of 48 percent of workers being women. This is exactly twice the average of tech startups with no female founders (24 percent) and is far higher than each of the top U.S. technology companies including Google (31 percent), Facebook (33 percent) and Uber (36 percent).

Alex Mittal, the CEO and co-founder of FundersClub, said that despite any preconceived notions about what the survey might find, “the magnitude was a surprise for us, the 2x difference was very surprising.”

The survey found that startups with at least one female founder also had 2.4 times the average percentage of women on their executive leadership teams (38 percent) and 2.3 times the average percentage of women on their engineering teams.

Several female founders remarked in the survey commentary that they didn’t set out to hire women but that female candidates gravitated towards them. The survey comes after a string of sexual harassment complaints have rocked Uber and prompted several high-profile executives to step down.

“Top female talent is more attracted to work on a team where they can see themselves in leadership and know that is respected in the company,” said KJ Erickson, the CEO of Simbi, a service exchange platform, as part of the survey’s feedback commentary.

Female-Founded Companies Still Far Behind

Despite the increase in recruitment of female employees, only 17 percent of tech startups had a female founder onboard according to a CrunchBase study of more than 43,000 companies worldwide. The percentage of venture-funded companies with women founders increased by about 8 percent from 2009 to 2012 – but in 5 years these numbers have seen no change whatsoever after a review of Q1 2017 data.

In March, Facebook’s No. 2 executive, Sheryl Sandberg, said that not only have there been no improvements in corporate female leadership – things have actually gotten worse worldwide.

“In terms of women in leadership roles, we are not better off. We are stuck at less than 6 percent of the Fortune 500 CEO jobs and their equivalent in almost every country in the world,” Sandberg said in a March 29 USA Today interview. “Overall, we are not seeing a major increase in female leadership in any industry or in any government in the world, and I think that's a shame.”

Several female founders surveyed by FundersClub echoed Sandbergs’ sentiment, stressing that tech companies should “hire out of network” more frequently.

Lauren Schulte, co-founder of The Flex Company startup, said that job requirements can often be viewed as preferential to hiring predominately white men.

“Reduce the number of ‘requirements’ in job descriptions as women, URMs and POC may opt out before applying if they don't meet 100% of requirements,” Schulte told FundersClub. “Tell your team what your diversity goals are and why they matter.”