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 startup scene has too few female founders. This finding is not new, but little has changed for years either. An initiative of the Federal Association of German Startups and the digital association Bitkom wants to change that and provides concrete proposals for action. Signed 27 well-known people from the scene such as 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. In addition, there is to be a transparency register for venture capitalists, in which the proportion of women-led and funded start-ups is to 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 should be a 30 percent quota of women in decision-making positions in state-owned funds.

Established startups are also to commit to a women's quota themselves. Part of the work is also to be to create a cultural change. It also aims to improve safeguards for women with families. "Strengthening the start-up activities of women is not an end in itself, but socially necessary and above all an imperative of economic reason and necessity," the initiative writes about its motivation.