A considerable number of women active in founding teams

“By sharing gender diversity data for our different startup programs operated by Venturelab is one way to contribute to the discussions on gender and high-tech entrepreneurship,” said Jordi Montserrat, co-founder and managing partner of Venturelab. “These number do not represent an exhaustive study, but provide interesting insights and hopefully motivate more women to embrace this career.”

Share of women and female members of the founding teams:

Innosuisse Start-up Training 2018 (15% to 38%)
Starting at the training level. The proportion of women among the 393 entrepreneurs in in Innosuisse Start-up Training workshops for business creation and business growth, varied strongly depending on the sector vertical. The data for female participation ranges from 15 percent, in the Advanced Engineering, to 38 percent in the Medtech courses. ICT, the most frequent course, averaged 19 percent, whereas in Biotech, 24 percent of participants were women. As Innosuisse requires participants to demonstrate their project or company's strong technological, academic or business model-oriented innovation, which usually requires a degree from one of Switzerland’s university or universities of applied sciences, these numbers are probably correlated with the number of women following a university courses in the respective fields.

Venture Kick 2018 (32%)
Moving from training to building the company, we find Venture Kick, which provides seed stage financing to innovative, science-based startups. About a third of spin-off projects that received Venture Kick support in 2018 included women in their team. Since the start of 2019, Venture Kick has seen a clear increase with 7 of the 12 projects winning stage 1 including women in their team, an impressive 58 percent and a very encouraging signal for the future.

TOP 100 Swiss Startup Award 2018 (28%)
Every September a panel of 100 leading investors and startup experts selected the 100 most innovative and promising Swiss startups. Last year all of the top three start-ups had women in their founding teams, as well as six of the top ten. Overall teams with women among the founder accounts for 28 percent of those ranked last year.

Venture Leaders 2018 (34%)
Venture Leaders – the swiss startup national teams – have been pitching international investors and networking with their global peers at high-level roadshows around the world since 2001. The selection process requires the startup to choose one team member to represent the company. In 2018, the cumulated number of women selected in Venture Leaders was only 10 percent (5 out of 50), whereas 34% of the companies included women among the founders.

(Press release)