The start-up scene wants to promote female founders more strongly

An initiative calls for concrete measures to promote female founders and provides suggestions for action for the start-up scene.

The start-up scene has too few female founders. This realization is not new, but little has changed for years. An initiative by the Federal Association of German Startups and the digital association Bitkom aims to change this and provides concrete proposals for action. The initiative has been signed by 27 well-known people from the scene, including Verena Pausder, Lea-Sophie Cramer, Anna Kaiser and Jana Tepe from Tandemploy and the presidents of the two associations, Christian Miele and Achim Berg.

The initiative wants to start with venture capitalists, public investors, scale-ups and the state. To this end, the associations want to launch regular surveys and record the results in a reporting system. To this end, there will be a transparency register for venture capitalists in which the proportion of women-led and funded start-ups will be recorded. They should also disclose the proportion of women in their own ranks. Five venture capitalists have agreed to this so far: DB Digital Ventures, Eventures, IBB Ventures, Unternehmertum Venture Capital (UVC) and West Tech Ventures. There is to be a 30% quota of women in decision-making positions in state funds.

Established start-ups should also commit to a women's quota themselves. Part of the work should also be to create a cultural change. In addition, the protection of women with families is to be improved. "Strengthening the start-up activities of women is not an end in itself, but a social necessity and, above all, an imperative of economic reason and necessity," writes the initiative about its motivation.