When Bob Williamson introduced the pitching competition finalists at Invest Atlantic last week, he proudly mentioned that half the presenters this year were female, a huge gain over the past few years.
The remarks by the head of Invest Atlantic are another indication that the Atlantic Canadian startup community is making headway with the goal of gender parity. To be clear, the community is a long way from being evenly divided in male- and female-led companies, but there are signs of progress.
As part of Entrevestor’s 2017 Atlantic Canadian Startup Data report, we assessed how many high-growth innovation companies in the region are headed by women. The headline number: 68 East Coast innovation startups have female CEOs, or 14 percent of the total number we tracked in 2017.
We conducted a similar study in 2014 and we counted 23 female CEOs, or 8 percent of the total community at the time. So, the number of female-led startups is rising both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the startup community.
When we include co-founders (a broader group of senior executives), we found there were 99 companies that can be considered female-led – more than one-fifth of the total community.
They include some of the leading startups in the region, such as Squiggle Park of Halifax, WellTrack and Green Imaging Solutions of Fredericton, and Gemba Software Solutions of Saint John.
CarbonCure's Jennifer Wagner Named a Climate Trailblazer
(Maybe we should have asked for senior leadership roles, as some of the leading companies have female members of the executive teams, though they’re not necessarily founders – such as Spring Loaded Technology COO Dawn Umlah, Proposify Head of Sales Lisa Jackson, and Harbr Head of Business Development Sarah Murphy.)
Twenty-six of the companies were launched in 2017 and a further 20 started in 2016, meaning that almost half the female-led companies are less than three years old. Several of these companies, like the Fredericton troika of Pfera, SomaDetect and Chinova Bioworks, are making great strides early in their development.
These 99 companies are showing exceptional metrics – outpacing the broader community in all categories. The companies with senior women executives employed 478 people at the end of 2017, and in total their staffing rose by more than 50 percent from the previous year.
Fifty-three of these companies responded to our survey, and the total revenue for those sharing such information was $7.5 million, up 92 percent from 2016.
The 99 companies raised a total of $39.8 million. That’s about 35 percent of the total for the community, a huge outperformance for 20 percent of the total companies.
One final note about companies with female leadership – their presence is being felt more and more in the community. More than one-quarter of them collaborate with post-secondary institutions. Genesis in St. John’s in 2018 launched its Women in Tech peer group to help support female entrepreneurs and tech specialists. It’s headed by Dyanna McCarthy, who worked for four-and-a-half years with the Newfoundland and Labrador Association of Technology Industries. Halifax-based Harbr has instituted a gender equality program in its staffing.
