At nearly every tech event around Chicago, attendees are guaranteed to hear a conversation about how to foster more diversity at local startup and tech companies. There’s a lot of perceived momentum around the mission, but a new study from the Illinois Technology Association shows women are still few and far between among the top positions at Chicago’s tech companies.
The ITA's annual study, published Thursday, measures the number of women in leadership roles at 300 Chicago-based technology companies. The study defined positions of leadership and influence as vice president, senior vice president and c-suite level.
The findings showed that among the 1,100 vice president and senior vice president roles at Chicago tech companies, only 26 percent are held by women.
Additionally, women hold only 13.6 percent of c-suite positions, or 125 of the 922 c-level roles included in ITA's study. This is about 10 percent less than the national average at U.S. companies, where women hold 23 percent of all c-suite roles, according to a recent McKinsey study.
But the most critical finding in ITA’s study was that only 6 percent of CEOs at 300 Chicago tech companies are women.
“We started on par with what’s happening on a national basis at the VP level and then we see it going down by half at each level that people move up,” said ITA CEO Julia Kanouse.
She said the two largest Chicago tech firms with female CEOs that were included in the study are Jellyvision’s Amanda Lannert and Solstice’s Kelly Manthey.
The ITA data also showed that bigger companies had fewer women than other, smaller companies included in the study, a finding that surprised Kanouse.
“You would hope the opposite would be true,” she said. “As you get larger and have more resources to pull from, and more resources to put into diversity initiatives, you think you would see a shift there, but we definitely didn’t see that in the data.”
The tech industry, like many other corporate sectors, has been frequently criticized for its lack of diversity.
“There’s relatively few companies actually setting metrics around it as well,” Kanouse said. “If you’re saying that [diversity] is important to you but you’re not actually measuring it or putting a true plan in place to make a difference, it’s not going to happen.”
Kanouse said Chicago tech companies that want to diversify their staffs should implement mentor and sponsor programs.
“A lot of companies are starting to take a look at that and understand how that affects their entire hiring and promotion process,” Kanouse said. “The companies that have put programs like that in place have seen significant returns in terms of the growth of diversity in their senior level positions.”
Besides gender gaps in leadership roles, other data shows there are disparities in how much venture capital is given to female founders compared to male ones.
Data from Pitchbook released Thursday shows that Chicago startups solely founded by female entrepreneurs received just $30 million of the nearly $2 billion that was invested in Chicago startups in 2018.
Though there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to ensuring women receive more opportunities in tech, whether it’s landing a c-suite role or a new round of funding, Kanouse said each person that works in tech should take it upon themselves to do their part.
“There are small and everyday things that people can do, even if it’s just sitting in a meeting and ensuring [everyone’s] voices are heard,” Kanouse said.
