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Did you know the London Startup ecosystem is the most gender-equal ecosystem in the world? That’s right. Before New York, Tel Aviv or even, wait for it, Silicon Valley – London wins the big one when it comes to gender diversity in the workforce. In fact, compared to the US, an entrepreneur is five times more likely to be female in the UK (source).
Over 30% of the UK startup ecosystem is made up of women. But how does this really look inside a startup?
Using LinkedIn, we took a look inside Tech City’s Future Fifty (including their alumni), and investigated those startups and tech companies with the most gender-equal commercial teams (here we define commercial teams composed of operations, sales and marketing teams).
Gender-Equal Commercial Teams
The list of the top ten most gender-equal firms is incredibly diverse: from Skyscanner (flight search), to Unruly (marketing and advertising), to LoopUp (internet telecommunications) – these businesses are as diverse in service and product as can be. There is no one type of business that defines this list or – by implication – that naturally inclines towards a gender-equal commercial workforce. However, four of the top ten most gender-equal firms identify themselves as internet companies: Skimlinks, Skyscanner, Secret Sales, Wonderbly (Formerly Lost My Name).
Significantly, there is an average of 40.5% women across all commercial teams we investigated. Compared to the average percentage of women in the entirety of the UK startup and tech ecosystem (30%), this positive figure displays the relatively gender diverse nature of commercial teams.
The majority of firms on the top ten list also have commercial teams that are smaller than 50 employees. The only exceptions to this are Funding Circle and Skyscanner – both of which, despite having a larger workforce, still have commercial teams under 100 people.
Beyond the Top Ten
Beyond this list, there are also a total of 19 firms with at least 40% of their employees being women. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the gender divide on commercial teams in startups and tech companies is less stark than the gender divide seen in the engineering workforce in the UK (a fifth of companies within London’s tech community still have no women at board level 2).
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Interestingly, those companies with significantly more females than males in commercial roles are all either e-commerce, lifestyle or travel related. In fact, the top three most female-dominated firms on our list: Farfetch (88% female), notonthehighstreet.com (80% female), matchesfashion.com (70% female) are all online shopping platforms. On the other hand, those firms with more males in commercial roles tend to be either SAAS or FinTech companies.
What Makes Them More Gender-Equal?
According to Wayra, those companies on our top ten list of most gender-equal firms are 3.5 times more likely to attract women because, put simply, diversity attracts diversity. But outside of this, there are still a lot of questions around why some startups and tech companies, such as our top ten list, are more diverse than others. Questions we want answered.
Because whatever these companies are doing – we want more of it.
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