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Delivery company Delivery Hero: men among themselves
Photo: HAYOUNG JEON / EPA-EFE / Shutterstock
Germany's start-ups like to present themselves as a modern, contemporary alternative to earlier generations of entrepreneurs.
That may be true for their business models, but at a central level they repeat the pattern of large stock exchange corporations - and their board members are almost exclusively made up of men.
This was the result of an evaluation by the German-Swedish Allbright Foundation, which advocates more women and diversity in management positions.
The study focused on young listed companies that were recently included in the Dax, MDax or SDax, to which several start-ups belong.
These include the food delivery services Delivery Hero and HelloFresh, the furniture dealers Home24 and Westwing and the used car platform Auto1.
Quota between five and ten percent
These newcomers to the stock exchange reliably pull down the proportion of women on the executive boards of the 160 listed companies every year.
In April 2021, the share of companies admitted to the stock exchange in the past five years was only 10.2 percent.
For those that were founded over the last 15 years, it was only 5.4 percent.
For comparison: among all listed companies, the share is 12.6 percent.
Only nine out of 30 young DAX, MDax and SDax companies even have a woman on their board of directors.
The pharmaceutical company Dermapharm is the only one to have two women.
The figures in the bodies that are supposed to control the executive boards are somewhat better: the supervisory boards.
There the proportion of women is on average 24.3 percent.
However, this is still less than the average of the 160 listed companies as a whole.
Four companies, including the battery and accumulator manufacturer Varta, have achieved the feat of not giving a woman a higher position at all.
Only men sit on the board of directors and the supervisory board.
More »Christians« and »Stefans« than women
The fact that a fairly homogeneous type of person has traditionally been successful in the top management of stock exchange corporations is nothing new.
The average board member of a company listed in Frankfurt is still 54 years old, an economist or engineer, a West German and is called Thomas.
But the homogeneity among young start-ups and newcomers to the stock market is apparently even greater. In particular, at companies that are not older than 15 years, the board members are even more often male and West German and even more often economists than the average. Only the names have changed: there are more Christians and Stefans on start-up boards than women.