Because of the pandemic, the Vodafone Institute ran the Female Accelerator F-Lane entirely as a virtual programme in 2020 – with more than 130 international mentors (male and female) supporting the startups with over 440 hours of programme content. The programme maximises potential for startup companies founded by and for women.

I’d like to introduce one of these programmes briefly: the global F-Lane Accelerator programme offered by the Vodafone Institute for Society and Communications. New approaches such as venture capital funds in which only women invest, or training programmes aimed solely at women, give me hope that we can balance up the situation a little – even without a quota – despite the fact that some of these strategies appear radical at first glance. But because this will probably be a long time coming, some people are already experimenting with alternative interim solutions. The imbalance is clear from the funding total received by female founders so far: just 5.2 per cent of teams made up of women have already accumulated a million euros or more – that sum stands at 27.8 per cent for male teams.Īs well as the quota, a modern family and education policy would certainly be a great additional support. And this trend continues in venture capital too. This number has not changed much over the past few years. This was the conclusion reached by the German Startups Association in its Female Founders Monitor 2020. Of everyone who has founded a startup in Germany, only around 16 per cent are women. For instance let’s take a look at the startup sector: in that environment, as a female startup founder – with a migration background – I’m clearly in the minority. I find that I am also represented far too sparsely elsewhere in the workplace, including outside female supervisory and management boards. Personally I can only welcome this decision. For this reason, supporters of the quota now consider this impact on management – significant though it is – to be politically justified. That’s why the quota has been introduced, because it’s effective: there’s already been a mandatory female quota of 30 per cent since 2016 for supervisory boards. Companies have not succeeded in promoting more women to senior roles with the voluntary system.

To be specific: if there are more than three members of the management board, at least one of them must be a woman. In future, the boardrooms of listed companies will have to become more female. But work is being done at many levels to increase the presence of women.

The German economy is still heavily male-dominated.

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