Four Ways To Foster Innovation by Supporting Women

cc-by wocintech

Here are some really cool facts about women who work in innovative spaces:

• Start-ups with female executives are more likely to succeed than those without;
• Venture capital firms that fund companies with female founders make more money; and
• The biotech sector is amongst the top type of businesses with female executives that tend to receive venture capital funding

It’s obviously good for business to support female innovators. Yet, on the whole, innovative female entrepreneurs and researchers are underfunded and underrepresented in comparison to men.

Want to make your organization more innovative by supporting the women working within it? Here are four ways to get started:

When women talk, listen

Foss, Moll, and Moilanen (2013) found that women tend to generate new, innovative ideas at the same rate as men, but women’s ideas are less often implemented within organizations, possibly due to a “lack of collegial support in executing their ideas”.

Being aware of implicit bias within your organization and actively working to correct it can allow the best ideas to rise to the top, unfettered.

Change the way you talk about innovation

Does your organization describe innovation in masculine terms? For example, is your lab “dominating” when it comes to funding, or is your data analysis team “crushing it”? Surprisingly, this kind of language might be why women in your organization aren’t considered innovators!

As Wickhamn & Knights (2013) explain, “what is considered ‘innovation’ is… a gendered process, by which themes of domination and control and the development of discrete outputs tends to take root over collaborative processes that develop ‘soft’ outcomes.”

Alsos, Hytti & Ljunggren (2013) suggest that “as a result of gendered constructions of innovation, public support for innovation or R&D is mainly given to men or provided by men.”

Crafting and practicing more gender-neutral language around themes of innovation in your organization may help your researchers become more receptive to female innovators without even realizing it.

Create gender-balanced funding panels

Innovation is reliant upon access to capital. Sadly, women are often disadvantaged when it comes to securing funding.

Female researchers in the US and Europe reportedly receive funding less often than men, and when they do receive funding, they often receive less of it.

In industry, a 2014 study by the Diana Project at Babson College found that “85 percent of all venture capital–funded businesses have no women on the executive team. Importantly, only 2.7 percent of venture capital-funded companies had a woman CEO.”

Yet when women are on VC funding panels, they reportedly fund female founders at higher rates than average. UK researchers have suggested that setting targets for “minimum gender representation on panels” could similarly close the research funding gap. Funders in both industry and academia could therefore easily support women innovators by ensuring that decision-making groups are gender-balanced.

Encourage women to undertake roles in all aspects of innovation

Socialization can, to an extent, determine what careers women choose and the trade-offs they make for family.

Alsos, Hytti & Ljunggren (2013) explain that men’s career choices allow them to be doers and funders, whereas women often assume support roles for innovation: “There are different roles assigned for women and men in the innovation pipeline (Duberley & Cohen, 2010): men are predominantly active in technology start-ups and in venture capital firms (Dautzenberg, 2012), while women are active in technology transfer offices.” They also suggest that it is “the intersection of gender and family responsibilities that impede women’s ability to innovate [seek patents]”.

Organizations serious about fostering the best talent should encourage female students and early career researchers to found startups, file for patents, and undertake other active roles in innovation–as well as encourage men to assume more balanced familial responsibilities.

So, there you have it: four seemingly small but ultimately important ways to support the women innovators in your organization. By better listening to women, subtly changing the way we talk about innovation, gender-balancing funding panels, and encouraging women to take innovative career paths, you can set your organization, department, or lab on the path to greater success and higher returns. Got ideas for other ways to support women innovators? Share them on Twitter with @digitalsci.
Stacy Konkiel is Research & Engagement Manager at Altmetric, a data science company that helps researchers discover the attention their work receives online. Since 2008, she has worked at the intersection of Open Science, research impact metrics, and academic library services with teams at Impactstory, Indiana University & PLOS.