A new study finds employees in companies with female founders report being happier with their work/life balance, company diversity and salary compensation, as well as stay in their roles longer, compared to male-founded tech companies.
The CTO Club carried out the study, which analysed 20 of the fastest-growing technology companies from around the world with female and male founders. Looking at Glassdoor.com, scores were given by employees on each category of company culture, diversity, work/life balance, compensation and career progression. Data on the median average tenure of employees was gathered from Linkedin.com.
According to the data, compared with male-founded companies, female-founded tech companies report higher employee satisfaction for diversity and inclusion (4.1 vs 3.8), work/life balance (4 vs 3.9) and compensation (3.8 vs 3.7). Employees at female-founded companies stayed on average for eight months longer than employees at male-founded companies (3 years vs 2.4 years)
Employees at male-founded companies report being happier with company culture (3.9 vs. 3.8) and career progression opportunities (3.6 vs. 3.5) than those at female-founded companies.
Preply, founded by Kirill Bigai, who remains CEO, came first out of the 20 companies with an average score of 4.3 for all categories. It was followed by cleaner lifestyle products company, Oura, with 4.2. Female-founded Canva, Clue and Verge Genomics also followed with a score of 4.2, making up the top five companies reporting the highest employee satisfaction.
The study also looked into employee approval for companies where the founder has remained in the CEO position and there was no difference between male-led and female-led companies.