the equality pursuit

Where are the Female Entrepreneurs of SynBio?

article by WiSTEM Data Team

This article is based on the social media mini-campaign of WiSTEM aimed at obtaining a first look into gender diversity in SynBio and biotech entrepreneurs.

WiSTEM Data Team hopes to gather and present relevant data in order to better understand and communicate female participation in the SynBio world. This article is based on the social media mini-campaign of WiSTEM aimed at obtaining a first look into gender diversity in SynBio and biotech entrepreneurs. For this campaign, we mapped the reported gender of the founders of 258 biotech/synbio startups founded over the last 15 years from all regions in the world. Details include the gender's founder ratio per region, female participation growth over the years, and prospective women’s participation in the field in light of recent initiatives that target female entrepreneurs.

Introduction

In the emerging world of SynBio, which is expanding every day with every new discovery, the field of entrepreneurship is a major step in its evolution and growth. The process of setting up a business is known as entrepreneurship, while the person that takes this initiative is called an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is an individual who creates a new business, bearing most of the risks and enjoying most of the rewards. They are commonly seen as an innovator6, a source of new ideas, goods, services, and business/or procedures.

But, why is entrepreneurship so important? An entrepreneur plays a key role in any economy, using the skills and initiative necessary to anticipate needs and bringing good new ideas to the market. As they create new businesses and invent new goods and services, a ripple effect is often created, resulting in further development. Such development generates new jobs, new products or technologies, creates new markets and new wealth, and ultimately adds to gross national income. The unique inventions that are introduced reduce dependence on existing methods and systems, thus breaking tradition and creating social change.1

Synthetic Biology, or SynBio, is the most exciting science of the twenty-first century10, bringing together engineers and biologists to design and build novel biomolecular components, networks, and pathways, and to use these constructs to rewire and reprogram organisms, just like you would a computer.

For the last 20 years, SynBio has promised to change the course of humanity, allowing us to use simple life forms engineered to manufacture cheaper drugs and vaccines, targeted therapies for attacking 'superbugs' and cure diseases, such as cancer and Covid-19.

It also aims to help us overcome the biggest challenge of our generation, climate change, by allowing us to harness the power of life to substitute our dependency on fossil fuels and stall the emission of greenhouse gases. And these many promises are starting to become a reality. SynBioBeta Market Report 2020 published that the SynBio startups funding increased by two-and-a-half times in 2020 compared to the previous year and reached nearly $8 Billion of investment funding.14

And it is at this critical stage of SynBio development that we must ask ourselves, where are the female entrepreneurs of SynBio? We believe that a science that is poised to enact profound change in human technology should be as inclusive and diverse as humanity itself. Therefore, we aimed at obtaining a first look into gender diversity in synthetic biology and biotechnology entrepreneurs.

Results

For this campaign, we mapped the reported gender of the founders of a total of 258 biotechnology/synbio startups founded over the last 15 years from all regions in the world.

Most startups were founded in North America (87 startups), followed by Europe (76 startups) and Australia and Asia (61 startups). Latin America and Africa had the smallest participation with 29 and 7, respectively. (Fig. 1)

The distribution of SynBio startups shown in Fig. 1 reflects the expected knowledge and technology flow, with North America and Europe leading with the highest number of startups. However, we notice that Australasia is gaining strength, which is in agreement with the growth in global flow towards Asia in this century and its current highest ranking in world GDP.

Latin America has traditionally lagged behind in biotech development because government investment in research and development (R&D) has been relatively low compared to top innovation countries like the US and Israel. Nevertheless, there has been an increased influx of private capital in the pharmaceutical industry in recent years, almost doubling from $68B to $110B, which is driving the development of new medical devices, treatments, and medications and a revolution in healthcare in Latin America.13 In consequence, we expect significant growth in biotech startups for this region over the next decade.

Overall, we found that only 1 female per 4.4 males became a biotech/synbio entrepreneur, an average of barely 19% of female founders in the 258 startups reported7. This number is even lower than the global percentage of females employed in STEM, which was reported at 29.3% by UNESCO in 2019.12

Breaking down this number by regions, we found that, remarkably, the more affluent and socially conscious regions of North America and Europe showed the lowest percentage of female founders (16% and 14%, respectively) compared to Asia (27%), Latin America (22%), and Africa (31%), regions that are more commonly associated with poverty, traditional gender roles and fewer opportunities for women and girls. (Fig. 3)

In the data we analyzed, out of 82 startups reported, American startups led by women only make up for 16.3%. Sangeeta Bhatia, CEO of Glympse Bio along with other MIT professors noticed the same problem from a smaller scale within the MIT women faculty. Out of 250 biotech startups created by MIT professors, 22 percent of MIT faculty which are women-only had founded less than 10 percent of it. The Future Founder Initiatives8 was launched in 2020 in response to this finding, aimed at increasing the number of MIT female faculty members to lead a startup. The initiative starts with increasing the participation of women faculties in entrepreneurial conversation and in-depth connections with venture capitalists.

Over time, we have found that the percentage of female founders has more than tripled in the last 15 years, from 4.8% in the 2006-2010 period, followed by a raise to 14.5% in 2011-2015 and almost doubling to 22.7% in 2016-2020. This steady increase in female representation amongst startup founders is encouraging and gives us reason to hope for more equity in the future. (Fig. 4)

What can be done?

Venture capital companies (VCs) or investors play a key role in either maintaining or avoiding gender disparity. We know that both STEM and entrepreneurship are highly gender-skewed9 and the small number of female entrepreneurs that we found in our analysis clearly illustrates the double masculinity that exists at this intersection. Not surprisingly, research has shown that there is a marked gender bias in the questions that investors pose to entrepreneurs during pitch hearings that affects the amount of money raised by female founders. VCs tend to ask male founders how to win, while they ask female founders how not to lose, thus leading the entrepreneurs to answer in line with the questions.

We still have a long road ahead in our quest for gender equality in the SynBio innovation ecosystem, but we seek to actively showcase and support all the initiatives that are taking significant steps forward.

By answering how not to lose instead of how to win, female entrepreneurs end up raising considerably less money for their enterprises.

Authors further proved that by training women to respond how-not-to-lose questions with how-to-win answers they increase money raised. Therefore, in order to increase gender equality, many targeted initiatives have been taken by VCs to actively reduce their implicit biases that lead to such underrepresentation of female entrepreneurs. One example is Sequoia Capital in India that has started the SPARK fellowship11, where 15 women founders-to-be from Southeast Asia and India are awarded one-on-one mentorship in order to build their companies. Another leading initiative is Decabillion+10 3, backed by two joint- initiatives, Beyond the Billion and High Water Woman, that aims to mobilize $10 Billion in investments for women-led startups, while also reaching out to diverse races in their portfolio.

If these initiatives seem exaggerated, we should consider that research conducted by the Boston Consulting Group has shown that businesses founded by women ultimately deliver higher revenue—more than twice as much per dollar invested—than those founded by men, making women-owned companies better investments for financial backers.

Consequently, we should strive to accelerate the participation of females in the synbio innovation ecosystem and support the creation and maintenance of other initiatives, like the Women in Bio5 organization that supports and mentor female entrepreneurial journeys in the life sciences and the government grants system offered by Australian CSIRO2 (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation ) aimed at “Boosting Female Founder Initiative”.

If you are a female interested in becoming an entrepreneur in SynBio, reach out to us and we will do our best to put you in touch with initiatives that can help you on your journey, like our very own EPIC initiative.4

WiTEM Data Team: Foteini Papadakis, Ruth Quintero, Meghiya Michelle, Rachel Ardón, Shrutika Sansaria, Johana Rincones

References

1: Abouzahr, K., Krentz, M., Harthorne, J., & Taplett, F. B. (2021, January). Why women-owned startups are a better bet. BCG Global. Retrieved from https://www.bcg.com/publications/2018/why-women-owned-startups-are-better-bet.

2: Synthetic Biology Future Science Platform. (2019). Boosting female founders initiative. Retrieved from https://research.csiro.au/synthetic-biology-fsp/boosting-female-founders-initiative/

3: DecaBillion+ . Retrieved from https://beyondthebillion.com/decabillionplus/

4: EPIC - After iGEM. Retrieved from https://igem.org/EPIC

5: Entrepreneur Center - Women in bio. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.womeninbio.org/general/custom.asp?page=EntrepreneurCenter.

6: Hayes, A. (2021). What you should know about entrepreneurs. Investopedia. Retrieved from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/entrepreneur.asp.

7: Kanze, D., Huang, L., Conley, M. A., & Higgins, E. T. (2018). We ask men to win and women not to lose: Closing the gender gap in startup funding. Academy of Management Journal, 61(2), 586-614. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2016.1215

8: Kate S. Petersen | School of Engineering. (2021). Future founders initiative aims to increase female entrepreneurship in Biotech. MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved from https://news.mit.edu/2021/future-founders-initiative-aims-increase-female-entrepreneurship-biotech-0224.

9: Kuschel, Katherina & Ettl, Kerstin & Díaz-García, Maria & Alsos, Gry. (2020). Stemming the gender gap in STEM entrepreneurship – insights into women’s entrepreneurship in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal. 16. 1-15. DOI: 10.1007/s11365-020-00642-5.

10: Meng, F., Ellis, T. (2020) The second decade of synthetic biology: 2010–2020. Nat Commun 11, 5174 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-19092-2

11: Sequoia Spark Program. Retrieved from https://www.sequoiacap.com/india/build/programs-events/sequoia-spark/

12: UNESCO Institute for Statistics. (2019). Fact Sheet No. 55: Women in Science. p. 2. Retrieved from http://uis.unesco.org/en/topic/women-science

13: Varas, P. (2019, October). Biotech is booming in Latin America: Here's why. Nearshore Americas. Retrieved from https://nearshoreamericas.com/biotech-is-booming-in-latin-america-heres-why/.

14: Wisner, S. (2021). Synthetic biology investment reached a new record of nearly $8 billion in 2020 - what does this mean for 2021? SynBioBeta. Retrieved from https://synbiobeta.com/synthetic-biology-investment-set-a-nearly-8-billion-record-in-2020-what-does-this-mean-for-2021/