In our latest episode with Laura Halligan and Meredith Moore, we discussed the gender gap that exists not only in technology but business as a whole. Laura and Meredith founded WIFL which stands for Women, Innovators, Founders, and Leaders. It is a group that is working to bring women in business together and shed light on the challenges they overcome. The conversation we had with them was eye-opening and very informative on how everyone can all do a better job going forward when it comes to diversity and inclusion. You can listen to the full episode below!
What I wanted to bring attention to with this article were some of the numbers related to the gender gap in the business community. Let's take a look.
Locally, there aren’t a lot of good numbers around female representation but we do have a few stats…
In 2019, Kentucky women who were full-time wage and salary workers had median usual weekly earnings of $724, or 79.2 percent of the $914 median usual weekly earnings of their male counterparts, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported.
Only 11% of businesses are founded by females in Kentucky.
Nationally, the stats are even more eye opening…
McKinsey analysis shows women’s jobs were 80% more vulnerable than men’s jobs during the pandemic.
Women-led startups received just 2.3% of VC funding in 2020. This is alarming given 20% of startups had female founders.
12% of decision-makers at VC’s are females.
What can be done to help improve equality? Well, it starts with all of us. We need to bring more awareness to this issue and the numbers that back it up. Awareness is the ultimate first step. Next, we need to take a look at our education systems and make sure women are being encouraged to follow the same career paths as men do. For instance, only about 20% of computer science students/professionals are females. That is clearly a problem and is one of the leading causes of the lack of women in the technology community. Next, we all need to act. We need to begin paying more attention to the ways we recruit, interview, and treat women and minorities in our workplaces. We encourage you to listen to the full episode and get more involved in the solutions!
As one of the founders of Middle Tech, I can say we need to do a better job finding more women and minority founders to interview and highlight. If you have founders in mind that fit the podcast, please reach out and share them with us. We look forward to hearing from you!
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