Gender dimensions of digitalisation: a comparison of Venture Capital backed start-ups across fields

ABSTRACT

The digitalisation of economic activities has given rise to much hope that it will lead to greater opportunities for women and a more ‘level playing field’ in the work place. On the other hand, there are concerns that the increasing success of the companies that are driving digitalisation might mean that the male-dominated culture of software companies is becoming more prominent and potentially reduces opportunities for women. This study investigates the gender distribution of key professionals in 8164 Venture Capital (VC) funded digital start-ups, as compared to information technology hardware and life sciences and biotechnology start-ups, as well as the impact of gender on VC funding. We find that, despite extensive advances in digitalisation over the past decade, women's participation remains low and continues to have a negative relationship with VC funding in both digital start-ups and other start-ups. Thus, our findings suggest that the recent digitalisation is not ‘levelling the playing field’ on a broad scale and that companies and policymakers need to be proactive to design inclusive strategies to capture benefits from a diverse workforce in digital start-ups.

KEYWORDS:

• Venture Capital
• gender
• digital start-ups
• digitalisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While it is beyond the scope of this paper to thematise the distinctions between gender and sex, and ‘woman’ and female’ in detail, we have considered these distinctions in the design of the study. We refer to gender and ‘woman’, aiming to acknowledge the social roles typically expressed by individuals through their first names, and acknowledge that our methodology may lead to a small number of erroneous attributions of gender.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

R. Sandra Schillo

R. Sandra Schillo leads the Inclusive Innovation Cluster at the Institute for Science, Society and Policy and is an Associate Professor at the Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, Canada. Her research focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship and their implications from a systems perspective. Her current work investigates and contributes to practice in innovation and digitalisation and various dimensions of inclusive innovation and the broad sense – inclusive of people, broad definitions of innovation, innovation outcomes and new conceptualizations of innovation governance.

Hassan Ebrahimi

Hassan Ebrahimi is a PhD student in Digital Transformation and Innovation at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He has a background in strategy and his research focuses on the impact of digitalisation on stakeholders.