Nearly a third of startups presented at WebSummit have a female founder

Nearly a third of the startups presenting at this year’s Web Summit have a female founder, and more than 37.5% of speakers are women, the organization said this Monday.

The Web Summit, considered one of the largest technology summits, kicks off this Monday in Lisbon with 2,600 startups participating, an all-time record, and for the first time without leader Paddy Cosgrave. The event will end on November 16th.

Now in its eighth year of hosting the event in the Portuguese capital, “almost a third of the ‘startups’ featured at the event “have a female founder, a statistic similar to what we saw at Collision 2023, which also represents a huge year-on-year increase.” , up from 17% last year,” the Web Summit report said.

In 2022, 42% of participants were women.

According to the annual State of Gender Equality in Technology report. [o estado da equidade de género na tecnologia] 2023, based on a survey of women in the tech community conducted by Web Summit, “nearly half of respondents believe their workplaces are not taking adequate measures to combat gender inequality, a figure that increased from 26% in 2020 to 47%” this year year.

Other data from the survey is that more than half (53.6%) have already experienced “sexism in the workplace in the past 12 months,” which represents a slight increase from the 49.5% recorded in the 2022 report.

More than two-thirds (77.2%) believe they need to “work harder to prove their worth because of their gender.”

At the same time, 76.1% consider themselves capable of achieving and/or maintaining a leadership position, and 41.8% feel the need to choose between family and career (compared to 50.4% in 2022).

“80.4% of companies surveyed have at least one woman in a leadership position, which is the same as last year (81.3%),” the Web Summit report said.