Women Made Up Only 9 Percent of Startup Engineering Execs

Women made up only 9% of engineering executives hired at startups over the past 5 years.

Not great!

Data comes from Carta's Annual Equity Report, which dug into the way equity and jobs are divvied out in startups by gender, race, and ethnicity.

Orange bars in the chart below show the percent of all hires that were women by function (hires made in startups from 2019-2023). The black lines are the percent of executive hires that were women over the same period.

𝗙𝘂𝗻𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗵𝗶𝗴𝗵𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘄𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗻

• HR (72% overall, 78% exec)

• Marketing (59% overall)

• Customers Success (51% overall)

𝗙𝘂𝗻𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗼𝘄𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘄𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗻

• Engineering (16% overall, 9% exec)

• Sales (27% overall, 17% exec)

• Data (30% overall, 16% exec)

Dispiriting.

I will say there has been some slight positive movement in Data and Eng over the past year or two, but the trend is weak at best.

Also, in contrast to trends on the founder side (where women founders are much more likely at young companies), women execs in technical roles are more common in mature startups than nascent ones.

Link to the full equity report in the comments below in case you want need some more weekend reading.

#cartadata #womenengineers #startups #hiring #startupleadership