The INCUBATE Playbook for Gender Balance
Helping more women become startup founders at university
As I get older and somewhat wiser it’s become obvious to me that some things have to change. In some cases, it is up to us older guys to find ways to lead that change, in particular levelling the playing field for women and minorities in startup and STEM land.
INCUBATE is the startup accelerator at The University of Sydney. We run a 14 week startup accelerator program with 8–10 teams twice a year and a number of other programs to support entrepreneurial student activities.
INCUBATE was formed nearly 5 years ago and has helped launch over 60 startups which have created over 100 jobs and raised over $8 million. Up until last year it was fully funded by the University of Sydney Union and some very supportive sponsors, including Lenovo Australia and New Zealand, Data61, AWS, Google, SoftLayer and many others. The University recently pledging $1 million in support over 5 years.
When I joined INCUBATE a year ago as the Resident Entrepreneur I made the decision that I wasn’t going to be the middle-aged white guy presiding over the creation of dozens of white-dude only startups.
The multicultural nature of our catchment ensures INCUBATE is racially diverse. In fact, our last batch only had one white guy (aside from me!) and this batch is super diverse (we’ve had over 15 nationalities represented in INCUBATE startups over the years).
A little over a year ago, we proactively started to drive the recruitment of female founders and while I believe we have done a good job so far, it’s not a solved problem and requires constant diligence.
As side note, this is and has to be a group effort. The INCUBATE team includes the talented Lizette Lee (Community), Jo Morrison (Director), James Alexander (Co-founder) and our newest recruit, Christopher Michaelides (Entrepreneur Associate).
In class 6 and 7 (2015–2016) we had 25% of the teams with women co-founders.
In Class 8 (2016):
- We had 7 female founders, >50% teams,
- Including 3 teams of dual female founders (I’m pretty sure this was a record for Australian incubators and accelerators at the time).
Class 9 (2017):
- We have 4 female founders (33% of teams). This is better than historical results but is still not awesome enough.
- The Class 9 gender imbalance is partially explained by the fact that one of the teams had 3 male and 3 female founders when we selected them, but only 2 males turned up to commit to the program. Disappointingly.
- In terms of applications to the accelerator Class 9, males made up 76% applications and females 24%.
- Also, Class 9 had an overwhelming flood of male STEM based PhD candidates apply and many of them had products, some with revenue, which skewed the balance as well.
Kyrylo Medvediev & Olga Oleinikova
It has not always been like this. While we have historically had at least one female founder per cohort, it was pretty rare to get more than 2 or 3.
We are committed to resolving this, but there is an issue, we simply cannot, and will not, make final selection decisions based on gender. We have to focus on talent and startup potential. It’s not fair to make a selection decision based on gender (the irony is not lost on me), in particular it’s not fair on a female founder to be a token selection and the female founders I speak with tell me they just wouldn’t want to be in that position.
This creates a problem, if you are aiming for gender balance you have to win the war on talent and balance long before you get to the Selection Panel.
The secret to success is ensuring you have a great selection of fantastic female founders in your funnel and this doesn’t happen by accident.
A few people have been very supportive of our efforts to address this including Nicole Williamson and Sam Wong. Nicole suggested a few months back that I write a post detailing what we do to ensure we are making progress on gender balance, so here is our playbook.
“…if you are aiming for gender balance you have to win the war on talent and balance long before you get to the Selection Panel.”
Accelerator Equality Playbook
So how do you get the recruitment funnel full of great female founders?
Filling the funnel
Start 3–5 months out talking to as many potential founders as possible. A lot of accelerators screen their applications online and often don’t meet the teams before selection interviews.
I aim to meet with as many people as I can and get to know them. Often the application doesn’t tell the real story, when we get to know them in a casual setting we often identify women who have a lot of talent and entrepreneurial appeal that may not have come out in the application. This makes it easier to shortlist them into the selection interviews and then their talent becomes obvious to the selection panel.
We also run a lot of on-campus recruitment and casual networking events through our other programs with the aim to bring potential female founders into the fold.
> Side note: Women can book in time with our new Entrepreneur Associate, Christopher, to get feedback on their startup and INCUBATE programs here.
Let them know the door is open and they have a real shot
When we run recruitment events we aim to speak directly to the women in the group during and after the presentations, with a view to drawing them into the process and encouraging them to make an application.
You have to be super frank about this, to the point of selling them directly on the benefits of the program and that you are keen to recruit female founders and will help them get through their challenges (these are the same challenges the guys face, just the guys either don’t realise it or don’t care). If they are motivated and have a great idea we let them know they stand an excellent chance of being selected.
The difference between guys and girls
You don’t have to ask a young guy if he is good or he has a good idea, give him a few minutes and he will tell you (even if they are not).
Young women are different, often less confident and definitely less pushy than their male counterparts. When it comes to filling the funnel you really have to spend time selling to the women that they are capable and have just as much right to be there as the guys.
A few statements I have heard from young women at these sessions;
- “We don’t have the confidence”
- “Is this program for girls as well as guys?” (yep, I kid you not)
- “I’m not sure if we are ready or good enough”
Guys on the other hand are super keen at question time after a presentation, pushing each other out of the way, while the girls may sit back quietly at their desks.
If you want to fill the funnel with great female candidates you have to put the guys back in their boxes and encourage the girls to come out and get involved in the conversation and draw their business ideas out.
“When it comes to filling the funnel you really have to spend time selling to the women that they are capable and have just as much right to be there as the guys.”
Selection & Judging Panels Matter
According to Sam Wong of Blackbird VC, “female mentor fatigue” is a real thing. They get constant requests for panels, mentoring and speaking engagements all the time and there just isn’t enough of them to go around.
Finding female mentors with an entrepreneurial track record that have the time to commit is a real challenge. INCUBATE has been actively recruiting on social media and via our networks for a year and have managed to add a handful to the list but we need more.
During the selection process we aim to have at least four women mentors shortlisting the applications online and at least one woman on each of the two selection panels, its a challenge to get their time and one I’m not sure we are winning.
Each of our startups has to present to their advisory board 3 times over the Incubate program which aims to simulate the a real board with investors and industry experts in their field and we consistently have at least one woman on each of the 3 board panels each month.
We have also managed to stack our Demo Day Judging Panel with a majority of women for the last few years (thank you Petra, Sam Wong and Natasha Rawlings).
Mentors Matter
We have ~100 mentors that help our startups, they are fantastic but it’s fair to say the list is not gender-balanced, with far more men on the roster. They are immensely experienced and talented and we are super grateful for their help, but if you want to level up on female founders you need female mentors.
Assuming you held on to the end of this very long post and you support what we are doing maybe you can help us?
If you are an experienced female entrepreneur or you have a particular talent that you can share with our startups please contact us and volunteer.
What Now?
Again this is not a solved problem and a persistent effort is required to keep improving the balance.
Given INCUBATE is dedicated to building tech startups and places the greatest weight on teams who can/are building product and developing their customer base, it seems to me in order to select more women for the Accelerator program, we need to get more of them building product.
The biggest challenge is relatively low number of women that are STEM trained both current students and graduates.
As at mid 2016 female University enrolments in Science based courses are at ~48%, however they are woefully under represented in Engineering and Information Technology enrolments at ~15–16%. At Sydney University we have some of the highest women enrollments in Engineering as well.
Given that a larger percentage of startups come from the Software, Hardware and Engineering areas rather than pure science and that these are the degrees that largely give the knowledge and skills to build products, we believe that in order to grow the number of female entrepreneurs we have to bridge the gap by teaching them how to build product before they apply to the accelerator even if they have not come from a technical background.
Introducing Proto
One of INCUBATE’s big initiatives this year is our new program Proto, a 5 week program running twice a semester which is open to anyone in the University with no selection process and no capacity limits.
Proto aims to take interested students and researchers through a rapid process of defining a problem, selecting a customer segment and designing and building an MVP and getting their MVP in front of users and working out how to start the process of building a startup.
We have high hopes for Proto, we believe it will lead to hundreds of new entrepreneurs and startups a year and by making it open to all students and alumni. We also think Proto will help increase the number of high quality startups with non-technical women founders at the helm.
Proto is open to University of Sydney students, researchers, staff and Alumni and will commence in early May 2017. You can register for Proto here and, of course, women are encouraged to apply!
If you support our approach please share this with your friends.
