Almost a third of the startups present at this year’s edition of the Web Summit have a woman as founder and more than 37.5% of the speakers are women, the organization announced this Monday.
The Web Summit, considered one of the largest technology summits, starts this Monday in Lisbon with 2,600 startups, a historical record and, for the first time, without Paddy Cosgrave at the helm, in an event that will end on November 16.
In the eighth edition of the edition in the Portuguese capital, “almost a third of the startups” presented at the event “have a female founder, a statistic similar to the one we saw at Collision 2023, which also represents a huge annual increase, up to 17% last year,” says a Web Summit note.
In 2021, 42% of participants were women.
According to the annual report The State of Gender Equality in Technology [o estado da equidade de género na tecnologia] 2023, which is based on a Web Summit survey of women in the tech community, “nearly half of respondents feel their workplace is not taking adequate steps to combat gender inequality, increasing from 26% in 2020 47%” this year.
Another piece of data from the study is that more than half (53.6%) have already been the subject of “machismo in the workplace in the last 12 months”, which represents a slight increase compared to the 49.5% registered in the 2022 report.
More than two-thirds (77.2%) believe they need to “work harder to prove themselves because of their gender.”
Additionally, 76.1% consider themselves empowered to achieve and/or maintain a leadership position, while 41.8% feel the need to choose between family and career (up from 50.4% in 2022).
“There is at least one woman in a senior management position in 80.4% of the companies surveyed, a similar proportion to last year (81.3%),” states the Web Summit.
Source: TSF
