Stock market start-ups even more masculine than traditional companies

Lisa Marie Münster Lisa Marie Münster | 18.06.2021

The executive ranks of publicly traded startups are overwhelmingly male, even more so than all 160 listed companies on the exchange combined. This is the conclusion of a study by the Allbright Foundation.

5.4 percent - that's the average percentage of women on the boards of startups listed on the stock exchange. If you take all 160 publicly traded companies together, the average percentage of women is 12.6 percent. These are the findings of a report by the Allbright Foundation, which is committed to more diversity in executive suites, and looked at the DAX, SDAX and MDAX as of April 1, 2021. Things look a little better on supervisory boards: 22.2 percent is the average share of women in startups, which is ten percent less than all companies on the stock exchange.

"Young Stock Market Companies with the Same Construction Flaw as the Old Ones" is how the foundation titles one of its chapters. Among the newcomers to the stock exchange, the most common name is not Thomas, but Christian. He is an economist, educated at the WHU in Koblenz or at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, six years younger than the average person on the stock exchange and rarely has academic titles. This is also due to who is founding: According to Startbase's Female Founders Report 2021, only 11.9 percent of founders in Germany are women.

In recent years, some large start-ups have gone public, such as Delivery Hero, HelloFresh or Westwing, and recently Auto1. Their boards are male, exceptions being Home24, for example. For the Allbright Foundation, this is also related to the allocation of capital: For example, one of the largest venture capitalists Rocket Internet in Germany is led by three men and has never had a woman on either the supervisory board or the board of directors. Rocket Internet has given capital to five of the start-ups studied by the foundation: Hellofresh, Delivery Hero, Westwing, Home24 and to Global Fashion Group, which Rocket Internet even founded.


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