Fewer than 10 per cent of African tech startups are led by a female CEO, while less than 15 per cent even have a female co One key finding is that African tech certainly does have a gender problem when it comes to women within leadership positions at startups. Of the 2,395 startups tracked for the purposes of this publication, only 350 – or 14.6 per cent – have at least one female co-founder, while just 230 (9.6%) have a woman CEO. While there are increasingly more opportunities to make the sector more welcoming and attractive to females, it is clear from the data that African tech remains a male-dominated landscape, and that there is serious work to be done in order to get women anywhere near parity from a leadership perspective within the space. Gender diversity clearly varies from country to country, but no one market has more than 23 per cent of its startups counting a female co-founder or CEO amongst its founding team. Generally, in markets with enough tracked startups to discern any trends, the smaller ecosystems outperform the larger ones from a diversity perspective, with greater ratios of female leaders in markets such as Zambia, Rwanda, Tunisia and Senegal than in traditional hotspots such as South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt and Kenya. -founder, according to a groundbreaking study on gender diversity released by Disrupt Africa.
