05 May Where Are the Female Unicorns?

For all the gains women have made in business, they are still far less likely than men to found the highest-value start-ups.

That’s the message from a research report by Goodcall.com examining the factors behind the success of male and female founders of unicorns (start-ups valued at $1 billion or more). The report found that male founders of these companies overwhelmingly outnumbered female, by about 20 to 1. And while the majority of female founders had earned a graduate degree, the majority of male founders had only an undergraduate degree.

Similar findings come from a National Bureau of Economics Research study looking at the proportion of women and men among top earners. Women account for 
16 percent of the top 1 percent of earners but just 11 percent of the top 0.01 percent.

For women to be as likely as men to attain these high-wealth positions, our educational system needs to do a better job of educating them in science and technology, observers say. “The girl who can dominate a field of robots is a woman who can dominate a field of men,” Martine Rothblatt, founder of both Sirius Satellite Radio and United Therapeutics, told the New York Times.