Actionable Steps to Promote Gender Equity in the Startup Ecosystem

Sasha Novakovich
Serbian Entrepreneurs
4 min readDec 13, 2017

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We at Serbian Entrepreneurs deeply believe in and champion the power of diversity. Yes, we are a group of Serbians in the global startup ecosystem which, admittedly, makes us a homogeneous group along that dimension. However, we know that supporting diversity of all kinds — gender, age, profession, religion, education, opinion, etc. — is not just the right thing to do, it is also beneficial to business outcomes.

To that end, promoting gender equality in the startup ecosystem is a high priority and is directly tied to our pay-it-forward mission. We are striving for equal gender representation within Serbian Entrepreneurs. More broadly, our members are committed to promoting gender equity within their startups, investment teams, and professional services firms. We know that equality of opportunity, experience, and reward benefit everyone, not only women.

In an effort to provide our members actionable ways to promote gender equity, we recently held a panel on the topic. Our panel included our guest Jennifer Lee; Principal at Learn Capital, and members Jovanka Ciric Vujkovic; CEO of Knewaira, Neda Cvijetic; Autonomous Vehicles at NVIDIA, Olja Dimitrijevic; Dir Engineering at Xvela, Iva Messy; HR exec at Altamont Capital and Sasha Novakovich; CEO of Alchemy. The following is a summary of the learnings and suggestions:

Venture Capital Perspective

  • Investors: ask your portfolio companies to report the diversity of their employees.
  • Investors proactively report the diversity of your investing professionals and partners.
  • Founders: proactively report the diversity of your employees to investors.
  • Founders: investigate competency-based hiring platforms for recruiting. For technical talent, Refdash, Interviewing.io and Qualified can be used for anonymous technical evaluations. More generic platforms include Sqore and ProSky.
  • Everyone: set up and/or support peer groups. Encourage women in your field to have the confidence and courage to match their competence.
  • Everyone: Reframe some of the discussion from women’s issue to family issues. Recognize that both mothers and fathers may benefit from flexibility to address family responsibilities.
  • Everyone: share your personal stories with friends and colleagues . Men can share both their own stories around family issues and those of the women they know. In general, we need to raise awareness and make this issue real and personal because statistics only go so far.

Founder Perspective

  • Purposefully seek out female leaders in the ecosystem so you/the female leaders in your company can benefit from network effects.
  • Actively and demonstrably promote equality of opportunity, experience, and reward as well as a culture of listening.
  • Develop your company’s reputation for valuing diversity.
  • Report diversity metrics.
  • Aim for a higher % of women across functions: proactively build a pipeline of candidates before you need to hire anyone, assign women impactful projects once hired, promote women on ability and potential (like managers disproportionately do for men) versus merely on historical accomplishments, provide equal pay for equal work.
  • Do not lower your hiring standards just to check the diversity checkbox — it’s counter productive. Instead, fill the top of your funnel with more qualified female candidates via gender neutral pipeline building.
  • Read about implicit bias. Take one or more bias tests. Women may be surprised by their own results.
  • Encourage women to speak up and listen to them when they are speaking.
  • Stay aware of how culture can promote negative gender stereotypes. When watching a movie put it to the Bechdel test. Talk to your peers, male and female, about the results.

Female Engineer Perspective

  • Founders / Managers: support equality of opportunity, experience and reward, as well as a culture of listening within the engineering function.
  • Founders / Managers: actively cultivate an inclusive environment and sense of rightful belonging for female engineers in the male dominated engineering world.
  • Founders / Managers: introduce family friendly work policies which help attract and retain engineers. For example, flexible schedules for time in the office/working from home (example: single moms in big companies, the quality of work within a deadline is important and not the time of the day when it was done).
  • Engineers: attend technical meetups and women-led conferences like WomenWhoCode and Grace Hopper and/or start a Lean In group at your organization.
  • Engineers: negotiate higher pay up front and ask for more pay as you grow in value and potential like your male counterparts.
  • Everyone: educate through data-driven studies and analysis and dispel the myths — highlight tangible benefits for the organization/company with a diverse team.
  • Everyone: help increase the top of the very top of the funnel by encouraging more girls to participate in engineering and entrepreneurship.
  • To the amazing women already in tech: extend your energy motivating and mentoring young women at the crucial stages of making decisions about a tech education. Be a volunteer/mentor at an organization that promotes girls in technology, such as GirlsWhoCode and BlackGirlsCode.

HR Perspective

  • Bring a strong HR leader in early, who can be a strategic partner to the executive/leadership team.
  • Support equality of opportunity, experience and reward, as well as a culture of listening in every function.
  • Be observant of biases, which can occur during recruiting, performance reviews, professional development conversations, negotiations, etc.
  • Offer unconscious bias and inclusive environment training.
  • Help facilitate meetings when ‘talking over’ is taking place, and train your team to address it when it occurs as well.
  • Deliberately work on all pipelines: recruitment, development, and retention of women.
  • Ensure you have a sponsor and mentor program.
  • Be observant and thoughtful. Certain times of the day simply do not lend well to having obligations outside of work, such as family. For example, early morning coffee meetings during school drop off times, or the casual team outings right after work during family dinner times.
  • Support extended maternity and paternity leaves.

Additional Resources Noted By Some Of Our Panelists

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Founder & CEO of alchemy.cloud, entrepreneur, company builder, strong supporter of female founders and women in tech.