Francesca Warner, founder and CEO of Diversity VC.
In the last six years much has changed in the European tech sector. Startup funding has exploded from $5 billion to over $23 billion, the number of companies valued at over a billion dollars has soared from 13 to 61, and Europe has grown to have 5.7 million developers, more than even the U.S.
One thing that hasn’t changed? The amount of funding going to female-founded tech companies.
In 2013 just 2% of total funding went to female-founded tech companies. In 2018, according to Atomico’s State of European Tech 2018 Report released today, that figure remains stuck at 2%.
Atomico The State of European Tech 2018
It’s “a chastening reminder of how far we still have to go” Francesca Warner, the CEO and cofounder of policy group Diversity VC, told Forbes ahead of the report’s publication.
“At the current rate of progress, it will take hundreds of years to reach a point where women get an equal share of funding to men.”
That lack of progress is despite a huge push to promote STEM subjects in schools, growing pressure on companies to publish their diversity figures and a legal requirement in the U.K. for companies to publish their gender pay gaps.
What the data shows is that these initiatives and an increased awareness of diversity is leading people to think things are changing, even if the actual figures prove otherwise.
Atomico The State of European Tech 2018.
More than 75% of the 5,000 tech founders and employees who responded to Atomico’s survey said they believe their own workplace is inclusive.
But the proportion of female attendees at tech-related Meetup events in Europe remains just 22%, a figure that’s increased by just a percent in the last three years.
“The environment is not changing fast enough,” said Niklas Zennström, founding partner and CEO of Atomico.
“We cannot measure the imbalance in funding allocated to other underrepresented communities, but those figures would certainly be tough reading also.”
Among the female founders who have managed to close funding rounds is Tugce Bulut, whose consumer insights startup Streetbees has raised £16.23 million ($20.67 million) since 2014.
"It is almost beyond parody that female-founded companies receive such a tiny proportion of European investment,” she told Forbes.
For now, Bulut, like so many other successful female founders, remains an outlier in a European funding environment otherwise embarrassingly skewed towards teams of male entrepreneurs.
UPDATE 2018-12-06 - Changed to reflect that 2% of total European venture funding went to female founders, not 2% of funding rounds.
