Stock market start-ups even more masculine than traditional companies

The management boards of listed start-ups are predominantly male, even more so than all 160 listed companies on the stock exchange as a whole. This is the result of a study by the Allbright Foundation.

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

"Young stock market companies with the same construction errors as the old ones" is the title of one of the foundation's chapters. Among the newcomers to the stock market, the most common name is not Thomas, but Christian. He is an economist, educated at WHU in Koblenz or the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, six years younger than the average stock market graduate and rarely has an academic title. This is also due to who founds: According to the Female Founders Report 2021 by Startbase, only 11.9 percent of founders in Germany are women.

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