These are the most gender-diverse start-ups in London, according to data

Recruitment start-up Otta has dug into the data to find London's gender-diverse tech companies 
Amelia Heathman9 March 2020

What do Streetbees, Farewill and CharlieHR have in common? They’re all start-ups based in London and they have managed to achieve gender diversity with a 50/50 split of men and women on their teams, according to data from tech recruitment start-up Otta.

Over the past few years, "women in tech" has become more than a buzzword with initiatives and organisations aiming to increase gender diversity in the tech sector. Around 17 per cent of the UK’s tech industry workforce are women yet the evidence that more diverse teams make more money – a report by McKinsey in 2018 stated that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 15 per cent more likely to have financial returns above the industry average – demonstrates the need to change this.

This is something Otta wants to tackle. The recruitment start-up launched in July 2019 by three former Nested employees, Sam Franklin, Theo Margoluis and Xav Kearney, in order to improve the job search for candidates seeking roles in high-growth tech companies.

“We saw there was a load of effort being put in by companies to improve their ability to hire candidates. But we realised that people were ignoring the candidates’ experience that they were going through,” explains Franklin. “The more people we spoke to who were looking for jobs, the more we realised there wasn’t really a place for people to be supported.”

As part of its bid to fix the broken job-searching market, Otta started looking at the gender diversity of the companies on its platform. These came about for a few reasons: its userbase is about 52 per cent women, 48 per cent men and so feedback from those looking for new roles demonstrated that a company’s diversity make up is high on the agenda. As well, it was also a desire to shine a light on the companies doing well, who shouldn’t be tarred by the male-dominating brush that so much of the tech industry is.

So how did they work it out? The team pulled together the top 450 start-ups in London and used tech to scour the LinkedIn pages of the companies’ employees. Then it analysed the names of the employees, checking them against an established global names database to determine if the person was a man or a woman. “It’s an 80 per cent solution, but as long as the company is big enough it gets you very good results,” says Franklin.

The companies which ranked the highest with women employees tend to be the ones that cater to women-focused consumer products, such as Bumble, Refinery29 and Elvie.

In the 50/50 gender diverse set, the start-ups included fashion data company Lyst, digital members’ club Pollen and the fintech TransferGo. Pollen’s CEO and co-founder Callum Negus-Fancey told the Standard: “We have hugely ambitious goals and in order to achieve them we have to make sure we are attracting, considering and retaining a broad talent pool that not only represents our customers and understands their needs but means we have as many different perspectives as possible to drive the best results.”

The start-up says 35 per cent of its engineers are women, above the industry standard, but it’s not just about gender diversity. Around 32 per cent of the team come from ethnic minorities, nine per cent identify as LGBTQA and 14 per cent are neurodivergent.

“One example of the ways we've attracted a diverse team is that 18 months ago we went fully pay transparent in order to join the fight to close inequality in pay for both gender and ethnicity. We know people join organisations based on what they do, not just what they say and we believe that pay transparency is a clear signal that we’re committed to creating an open, honest and diverse environment, which means we will attract a more diverse talent pool,” he added.

Over at Streetbees, founder and CEO Tugce Bulut says the start-up has managed to achieve a diverse team by hiring “the best staff possible and creating an inclusive company that everyone wants to work for.

“For me, culture is a living being and one of the most crucial elements is fore senior management to be open to letting other people in the team influence it.”

Otta didn’t just examine the gender make-up of the staff at these start-ups but also the people leading them. According to Otta’s data London’s start-ups were founded by 771 men, and 92 women. There are almost more founders named Ben, James, David, Tom or Daniel (75 total), then there are women tech founders. “There’s been lots of reports by Diversity VC on how women entrepreneurs just aren’t funded as much as men,” says Franklin. “Again, this is part of our attitude of, let’s put this transparency out there to start the conversation.”

How is Otta going to use this data for its own purposes? If you click on a company’s profile on Otta, the gender stats will be displayed there along with who the founders are, so people can get a feel for a company before applying for a role. Franklin says in-house, they know all too well how difficult it can be to get that culture balance right from the start.

“I founded the company with two male friends, so at one point we were all men. We’ve just hired our first engineer, a woman, so now we’re 75/25 per cent,” he explains. “I would love to get to that 50 per cent. It’s really tough to get there when you’re small but it makes business sense. Already, our engineer is saying I know lots of other fantastic women engineers and you sort of create that environment of diversity and inclusion early on.”

In addition, Otta hopes to work with companies on how they can improve their statistics. “For the companies that aren’t necessarily as strong on their gender diversity, [we want to say] maybe these are the three steps that they can do to improve their ability to attract great talent.”

It’s clear the conversation about diversity in tech has a long way to go, but with a little help from the data, it can shine a light on where the issues are and demonstrate that steps need to be taken to improve it.

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