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Women CEOs vs. Woman-Led Companies

Name: Women CEOs vs. Woman-Led Companies
Uploaded: 2020-08-04T17:16:05+00:00
Duration: 1 min 10 s
Channel: Royston G King
Description: In this monologue, the speaker expresses frustration with the common use of the term "women-led" to describe companies that merely have a woman on the…

4 Aug 2020 · 1 min

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In this monologue, the speaker expresses frustration with the common use of the term "women-led" to describe companies that merely have a woman on the founding or management team. Drawing on years of entrepreneurial experience, the speaker argues that venture capitalists interact primarily with CEOs, who are the individuals hired and fired by the board and thus truly lead the company. Consequently, the speaker contends that the meaningful metric should be the proportion of women CEOs, which he cites as roughly 3%, rather than the inflated figure of about 20% of companies having a woman on the leadership team. He criticizes the industry for emphasizing the broader, less meaningful statistic to mask the poor representation of women at the CEO level.

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This is actually a bit of a pet peeve of mine. It's been really funny to see everybody promoting sort of women-led companies is what you see when you see the stats nowadays from many, many people. And they sort of— women-led means there's a woman in the founding team. It's like Microsoft's a woman-led company. It's sort of the management team. But it's been because the stats are just so horribly bad. For me, it's really simple. I mean, I've been in entrepreneurship for many years. And for me, what I learned always as an entrepreneur is VCs want to deal with the CEO. The CEO is the person who the board hires or fires. The CEO is the one in charge of the company. They are fundamentally delegated by the board to run the company. So if you want to look at who's leading the company, you look at the CEO. So we count CEOs. That's what we figure matters. But the reason the industry doesn't do it is because the stats are so horrendous when you count women CEOs. So they want to say, oh, there's a woman in the leadership team in 20% of the companies we fund, rather than there's a woman CEO in 3% of the companies we fund. But it's just, to me, it's rather ridiculous. And I think the leader is the CEO because that's who's in charge.