The biotech industry offers unique opportunities for women to advance as executives and entrepreneurs. There are headwinds, however, including unequal access to venture capital. In this episode, we talk with three executives who are part of a wave of women-led companies in biotech. Our guests speak to why women’s leadership matters and the barriers that remain to breaking the glass ceiling. They also tell us about a new networking initiative—the biotech sisterhood—to catalyze women’s success in corporate leadership and mentor the next generation of women executives.
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The biotech industry offers unique opportunities for women to advance as executives and entrepreneurs. There are headwinds, however, including unequal access to venture capital. In this episode, we talk with three executives who are part of a wave of women-led companies in biotech. Our guests speak to why women’s leadership matters and the barriers that remain to breaking the glass ceiling. They also tell us about a new networking initiative—the biotech sisterhood—to catalyze women’s success in corporate leadership and mentor the next generation of women executives.
For more resources, visit Women In BIO, Lean In, and The Economist’s glass-ceiling index.
Laurie McGraw (00:06):
Now a dozen years ago in one of, perhaps, the most watched Ted Talks of all time, Sheryl Sandberg asked the question, "Why do we have too few women leaders?" And as someone with many years in leadership and always a deep conviction that we need more women in leadership, I thought this was a great question then, that is a great question now.
Rachel King (00:33):
That's business leader Laurie McGraw talking about a widely watched Ted Talk given by Sheryl Sandberg 12 years ago when she was the COO of Facebook. The topic was why there aren't more women in leadership roles in business. Two years after her Ted Talk, Sandberg went on to write her best-selling book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. The book was a clarion call for women to assert themselves and, quote, "sit at the table." It inspired a generation of women to seek senior level roles at companies and other organizations. So as Laurie says in that clip at the start of this episode, where are we? How much progress have women made in corporate leadership? In this episode, we talk with three women in leadership in biotech. We discuss the state of women in the workplace and we look at what needs to change for more women to advance and feel equally valued in their companies. I'm Rachel King, and you're listening to I Am BIO.
(01:53):
You can probably guess the answer to the question about how much progress has been made in growing women's ranks in corporate leadership. Not enough. Less than 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. More than half of US companies have no women on their leadership teams. Only one in four C-suite executives is a woman. Even worse, only one in 20 top leadership positions is filled by a woman of color. Our first guest shares why that's a problem, not only for women, but for their companies as well.
Anna Rath (02:25):
Hi, I'm Anna Rath, and I am the CEO of Vestaron. What we are doing at Vestaron is introducing a novel class of molecules to the world of crop protection.
Rachel King (02:37):
Anna says women make companies more successful. Having women in corporate leadership is just good for business.
Anna Rath (02:43):
(laughs) Matters that women are at this table because diversity, and in particular women as part of that, make companies better. Organizations in the top quartile of gender diversity are 25% more likely to experience above average profitability than those in the lowest quartile. Also, companies employing an equal number of men and women have up to 41% higher revenue. So all of the statistics show that having diversity, and in particular having women, and having diverse representation at senior levels of organization just make organizations perform better. So it's important to the organizations, and then it's also important to society because if you're not leveraging all of the talent that you have, the full workforce that you have, you are just not being as productive as you might be.
Rachel King (03:29):
Even the small number of women CEOs, directors, and executives is an improvement over 10 or 20 years ago. But our next guest says it's not good enough, we still have a long way to go.
Grace Colón (03:40):
My name is Grace Colón, and I'm a long-time biotech executive, entrepreneur, and board member. Many people ask the question, "Is the glass ceiling broken?" Because we've seen enormous progress over the last 10, 20 years in terms of what women have been able to achieve. Unfortunately, the answer is clearly no, the glass ceiling is, is, is not broken. In the famous words of Hillary Clinton, "It's been shattered in a million pieces, but it's not exactly broken," and here are the facts. 10% of CEOs in Fortune 500 companies are female. And that's an improvement over the past few years, but it's still only 10%.
(04:26):
Board representation has gone up, both in the private and public sector, but it's still far from parity. The percentage of female investment partners and VCs is still in the single digits, or maybe in the low teens depending on the various industries, but the percentage of VC funding that goes to women-led companies is still in the single digits. Women still make less on the dollar than men do, particularly women of color. If you look at The Economist's glass-ceiling index, which measures various factors in OECD countries, rates of higher education, labor force participation rate, gender wage gap, it's still sadly not quite there, particularly the US.
Rachel King (05:11):
Our third guest says the numbers are better within the biotech industry, but there's still room for improvement.
Erika Smith (05:17):
My name is Erika Smith, I am the CEO of a company called ReNetX Bio, and I'm also the chair of the Emerging Companies section of BIO. For the first time in history, women-led CEOs are 10% of the Fortune 500 companies. As wonderful as that is, that's momentum, that's just 10%. And, you know, for women of color and other minorities, we have not done the right thing. So I think it's better for biotech. What I've seen, it's about 35% of executive teams have women and about 20% are CEOs. So maybe twice the amount of the general population. If a young women were to ask me about going into biotech, I would, first and foremost, I would say, "Go girl! Run for it. It's awesome. There's so much opportunity."
Rachel King (06:02):
All three of these successful executive women have thoughts about how to improve representation of women in corporate management and C-suites. Erika says women need to have the confidence to assert themselves. Or, as Sheryl Sandberg has said, "Sit at the table and lean in."
Erika Smith (06:20):
I put together a program where we bring together 40 or so women, faculty members, students, really talented individuals to try to encourage them to become entrepreneurs, because there's very few women that say, you know, "I'm gonna do that as part of my field." And one of our speakers came in and she asked the audience, again, really, really talented professional women, "Who here is bold?" And literally no one raised their hand. And so she starts asking questions kind of along the lines of, "Did you ever take on a challenging task?" And a few people raised their hand. And then she asked, "Did you ever succeed at something that was difficult?" And then, "Did you ever try something that you didn't know you would succeed for the first time?"
(07:03):
And then hands were raising and raising and raising, and then it finally dawned to say, you know, "What is the problem with people being bold?" Why were women in this group and others not willing to raise their hands? And it just kind of made clear how this inherent bias that this is an unacceptable attribute, potentially, for women to embrace. And so it was really this sort of recognition of this stigma of certain connotations and descriptions, I'll put in air quotes, "masculine," like, boldness, ambition, assertiveness, and so on and so forth. Just really got me to thinking about, how do we change these really, really deep-seated feelings so that people can come to the group and change their mindsets about, you know, who and who can not be leaders?
Rachel King (07:52):
Grace says some of the responsibility falls on men in management. They need to understand that having women in corporate leadership is beneficial to them and to the companies they lead.
Grace Colón (08:02):
Any change to the status quo means this perception that people who have traditionally had all the power and all the resources will now have less. And see, this is where diversity is so critical. Because honestly, the pie can be much bigger if we allow more women and people of color to be in positions of power. Because we think more out of the box. We can do more with less. When people who are in positions of power and own most of everything right now fear this type of change, it's because they fear losing what they have. But I have news, it does not have to be that way. I'll give you a great example, women's health. It's been traditionally under-invested in. We get told time and time again that it's a niche market, when it's 50% of the population. This is an investment opportunity. There is a market that is untapped that we can help create, we just need the opportunity to do so.
Rachel King (09:03):
Even in companies where boards and leaders understand what women can bring to the table, change doesn't happen on its own. Companies must be intentional about growing opportunities for women to advance into senior leadership, and identifying who the rising starts might be. Anna says her company is doing just that.
Anna Rath (09:22):
I've actually been doing a good bit of reading about this because as the head of an organization that did its first D, E, and I assessment last year, what we found is that we are about half-and-half in terms of men and women overall, but like so many other companies, we are not as strong in women in senior positions as we might be. There's some really interesting analysis out there that says that a lot of the reason why women don't end up in senior management is because they miss that first rung on the ladder, that first position of overseeing people, of being a manager, and if you don't start that first rung of the ladder, you never get to the top of the ladder.
(10:05):
And so, what we have done as Vestaron is really try to think about all of the ways that we can encourage women to take those early steps into leadership so that you're building the base of talent that you can then draw from. And that's everything from being really thoughtful about reviews and about working through career advancement strategy with each person in the company, it's about mentorship, it's about events and training and development programs, really, again, to make sure that you as an individual company, and then more broadly, we as a society, are taking full advantage of all of the talent that our workforce has to offer.
(10:54):
There was a really interesting study done by Catalyst that was looking at this issue of, why do high-potential women, because women are now going to college in larger numbers, they're now going to graduate school in larger numbers, what's happening to these high-potential women? Why aren't they successfully climbing the ladder? So what they looked at was the nature of projects given to these young MBAs. They followed 1,660 business school graduates, and what they found was that on average, the men's projects had budgets that were twice as big and three times as many staffers as the women's project. And then only 22% of the women, but 30% of the men, were given budgets of more than 10 million, and just 46% of the women versus 56% of the men received P&L responsibility, which is of course essential to getting to, sort of, general management level. And then while more than a third of the men reported that their assignments garnered them a great deal of attention from the C-suite, only about a quarter of the women could say the same. And so in all likelihood, none of those women in that moment felt that they were being discriminated against, but in aggregate, across the numbers, it just says that men were consistently being given more of a leg up than were the, the women.
(12:30):
There's another one that was a study of performance evaluations at a Wall Street law firm. And what it showed was that the women actually received more position comments, things like, "Excellent," and "Stellar," and "Terrific," than the men, but only 6% of the women versus 15% of the men were mentioned as potential partner material. One of the things that we decided to do was be really conscious of reviews and talking about career paths with everybody in the company.
Rachel King (13:14):
Mentorship and networking have been very important to me throughout my career. I also think that this industry can offer wonderful opportunities for women to become leaders and to have real impact. We'll talk more about these topics when we come back from the break, and we'll look at why biotech companies are doing better than companies in general when it comes to women in leadership.
(13:45):
Your health is the most important thing, so your healthcare decisions should be made by you and your medical provider, not a middleman you've never heard of. Sadly, pharmacy benefit managers done see it that way. PBMs can determine the price you pay at the counter and even deny access to certain drugs, all to pad their bottom line. Please visit bio.org/pbm to tell your elected officials that you support PBM reform.
(14:27):
Biotech companies, especially smaller startup biotechs may provide women more opportunities. Erika says biotech can be a great fit for women looking to build successful careers while making a difference.
Erika Smith (14:40):
I do believe that the biotech industry has a huge opportunity for women, and I will say that because of myself being a CEO of an innovative startup company, but also for a couple of other factors that I think are worth pointing out. You know, the first is that women are very highly represented in life sciences from the educational point of view. I think two thirds of people with bachelor's degrees are women in life sciences, psychology, and social science fields, so there's a lot of people being educated in this area. And I also believe that women, you know, maybe it's just my perspective, that they're driven by things that are not necessarily only financial. I think people like to feel like there's a double bottom line, you're giving back, there's, you know, a benefit to community. So I think those are all really positive factors to encouraging women especially in startup, or in smaller companies in biotech.
(15:38):
I think there are some headwinds though, there's some structural issues that exist. The first is, patents, I think there's only about 13% of women that hold patents, and that's the lifeblood of our industry. If you don't have technology that you can protect, it's gonna be hard to do anything beyond. And then again, you need cash, you need a lot of money to do a lot of things for a long time before you generate revenue. And so on the financing side, about 8% of venture capital people are women in that community. So there's a s- subset of women that are represented there. According to an HBS study, there's about 3% of women-led startups that receive VC funding. So I'm optimistic, I think there's opportunity, but I think there are certainly some structural things that still exist that will benefit from change going forward.
Rachel King (16:24):
Our guests all say that women face a higher hurdle than men do in seeking investment to start or grow companies. Here's Anna again with some eye-opening statistics on women's representation, or lack thereof, in the VC world.
Anna Rath (16:38):
Venture-backed companies across the board, the statistics here regarding women are really quite (laughs) abysmal. Women are only 8.6% of all venture capitalists. Fewer than 5% of all VC-funded firms have women on their executive teams. Only 2.7% (laughs) have a female CEO. Less than 3% of all VC investment, uh, is in women-led companies, and only one-fifth of US venture capital went last year to startups with at least one woman on the founder team. So I actually think yes, biotechnology presents unique opportunities for women who want to be working in a space that they feel really passionate about, where they feel like they can be having a positive impact on the world, but it also, I think, biotechnology has the opportunity to then be a bit of a role model to other industries. Because if we do have these successful women-founded, women-run, women-led companies in biotechnology, that can hopefully help start changing the game of, sort of, where venture capital financing goes, and being an equalizer in that world as well.
Rachel King (17:46):
Studies have shown that women entrepreneurs get different questions from potential investors than men do. Grace says inherent stereotypes create a bias against women-led startups.
Grace Colón (17:57):
I think that part of the challenge is this stereotype of risk tolerance, of ability to deliver, of culturally, the way male investors perceive opportunities versus risk. For example, a male entrepreneur might come in and talk more about the opportunity and the, the potential upside. And male investors seem to place more weight on that than they do on the risk side of the equation, whereas with women, we tend to get more questions about that. "What can go wrong? What's risky? What about this?" And, "You haven't done this," or, "You've never been proven." Whereas I can't even tell you how many times male investors will invest in a first-time male CEO who has no experience in the area. And that happens still far too often. So we're not being looked at on an equal footing with a male of the same background.
(18:56):
And the only way I see to change that is one, get more male allies in the VC world, of which I have many, I'm very happy to say, and many of my female colleagues do as well. But there's not enough of them. But much more importantly, we need to get more female VCs in positions of investment decision-making, so general partners on the investment committees. I think VCs are trying to make an effort to hire more early stage positions and associates, but we still have a long way to go for them to make the environment welcoming and creating an environment that can enable these women to be successful and be promoted into investment roles. The trends are definitely going in a positive direction, but not quickly enough in my mind.
Rachel King (19:51):
At BIO, we're fortunate to have several women CEOs and corporate executives serving on our board of directors and on our committees and working groups. Anna chairs our Agriculture and Environment section board and sits on our executive committee. Erika chairs our Emerging Companies section, and Grace is an executive committee member. One exciting effort that has emerged somewhat organically is what the members call the Biotech Sisterhood. Grace tells us more about this network of women CEOs and industry leaders who help each other success.
Grace Colón (20:25):
The Biotech Sisterhood is the name we've coined for an informal networking group that was started about a year and a half ago by Angie Yu, Sheila Gujrathi, and Julia Owens. It occurred to them that we should really try to increase the opportunities for mentoring and supporting each other in the way that we see so many men have, which is being able to pick up the phone and ask a quick question about anything, or send a quick text. We realized we needed numbers. And so they started with summit that took place in Arizona in the spring of last year, and it was about 25 people, I think 50 people were invited, 25 people were able to make it, and it was an instant connection of the like I've never seen before where we all bonded instantly over a period of two or three days, and realized that we hungered for more of the same.
(21:23):
What we find is that we're the first people we turn to when we have a question. "Does anybody know a good CFO? What law firm are you using for this? I, I have an HR question, can anybody help me?" And that just accelerates and helps us succeed in whatever we're doing. We also place each other on each other's boards, we've gotten investors to invest in each other, and it's really catalyzed a number of fantastic things. We've co-founded companies together, and it's only growing from there. In addition, we've started mentoring the next generation of women who aspire to be CEOs, and we've, we've talked about the beginnings of kind of a CXO network.
Rachel King (22:05):
Erika is equally excited about the Biotech Sisterhood.
Erika Smith (22:08):
It's an informal network of over about 100 women both nationally and internationally that have come together to form a trusted network. And I just wanna emphasize the trusted network piece. A lot can get done when you have personal engagement of trust across many backgrounds of successful individuals and huge opportunities can arise. So what we've found in coming together and being transparent, being vulnerable as CEOs, it's a lonely role, by the way, you know, so making sure that you have some resources to draw upon has been really, really valuable. It's sort of like the, quote, unquote, "change to the old boys' network." You know, this is a group that's come together very collaboratively, very intentionally to help each other, and not just help each other in our current roles, which is certainly very important, but it's also to help the next generation, because we know how important it is to be bringing other women and other diverse candidates up as we grow our own businesses and we move along in our careers as well.
Rachel King (23:15):
We need more women leaders in biotech, like our guests, Erika, Grace, and Anna. I want to thank them for their leadership for this vital industry, and for their insights on why and how to place more women at the table of corporate leadership and governance. I also hope their words inspire young women and women of all ages to lean in and be bold. And thank you all for listening. Make sure to subscribe, rate, and/or review this podcast, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at iambiotech. And subscribe to Good Day BIO at bio.org/goodday.
(23:56):
This episode was developed by Executive Producer Theresa Brady, and Producers Lynne Finnerty and Kourtney Gastinell. It was engineered and mixed by Jay Goodman with theme music created Luke Smith and Sam Brady.