The Stanford Project on Emerging Companies (SPEC), led by James Baron and Michael Hannan at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, conducted a multi-year study of high-technology startups.
Their statistics on women’s representation in high-tech startups:
- 94% of clerical posts were held by women
- 54% of administrative roles were held by women
- 17% of technical positions were held by women
- 14% of senior management roles were held by women
- Senior female representation was mostly found in HR departments
- Only 4% of firms had women in senior technical positions
- Only 10% of firms had a woman CEO, President, or Founder
These findings are important because a lot of researchers and practitioners have wondered whether startups have a greater representation of technical women than large companies. These data suggest that women’s representation in high-tech across positions in very similar to representation in Fortune 500 high tech companies (see ABI research white paper on the state of representation of Women in high tech industry at: http://anitaborg.org/news/research/)
While women in senior positions were very unlikely to be found in senior technical and CEO roles, the researchers found that when women held these senior management and engineering positions, the companies had significantly more women in engineering and science roles across the board.
For our mission, this means that ABI’s efforts to put more women at the top in these positions has a positive impact on the representation of technical women at all levels of the pipeline.