On this International Womens’ Day we thought we would take the opportunity to celebrate the top 10 ranked Female-led Startups from our 2016 Annual Ranking. There are also great initiatives to encourage female entrepreneurship which we would like to acknowledge, including Springboard, and Shestarts and a bunch of other groups and programs aimed getting our girls into STEM education – too many to mention here but we are aiming to feature some soon.
The table below lists the top 10 ranked female-led startups including their standing in our annual ranking. The Rankings were calculated by adding scores each company we have been tracking in our then fortnightly rankings of trending startups (we have now moved to monthly rankings now that we have taken the ranking national). Read more about our Startup Rankings here.
[table id=101 /]
Some observations:
- While we have not been actively tracking the gender of founders and senior management of companies on Techboard, we have noticed that female entrepreneurs are not very well represented amongst Startups and Tech Companies on Techboard (although we note that all the companies in this top 10 also have a male co-founder). There are probably a number of reasons for this under-representation of female led businesses on Techboard but we would note that some commentators such as Naomi Simpson have observed that women entrepreneurs tend to start businesses that are less Tech focused and therefore less likely to qualify for listing on Techboard (see our listing rules).
- The companies in this list cover a range of industries not traditionally regarded as particularly feminine including power, industrial safety and logistics, there are also a number of startups in fields that would traditionally be regarded as more feminine.
- From this list only Tap into Safety and Powerledger have topped a Techboard fortnightly ranking.
- Of the more technical Startups in the list, the female founders tend to play the role of business or marketing lead, rather than technical lead.
- Freight Exchange was started in Perth.. went to Sydney to join Telstra’s muru-D accelerator.
- We have not included two formerly-female led companies in this top 10 Avita Medical (ranked 7th) that has evolved from Fiona Wood’s Clinical Cell Culture (which was established to commercialise her Spray on Skin invention) and Seqta ranked 34th as thy are no longer female-led.
