Biotech Tilts at the Tipping Point of Gender Equality

On April 19, 2021, BioSpace reported, on the gender gap in Biotech. With women like Dr. Beth Seidenberg breaking down barriers and blasting through glass ceilings, it’s only a matter of time before we see these numbers changed dramatically.

A recent report by Deerfield Management Company revealed an unsettling but unsurprising truth: There is a significant gender gap on the boards of venture-backed health care companies.

Deerfield, a health care investment management firm, examined 140 companies that had raised at least $25 million in venture capital (VC) financing and published the identities of their board members on their corporate website. They found that nearly half (48.5%) of these companies did not have a single female board member, while women make up only about 10% of board director roles.

BioSpace’s own 2020 U.S. Life Sciences Diversity & Inclusion Report found that only 14% of respondents identifying as female felt that opportunities for promotion at their companies were fair, while 24% said that employees of all backgrounds are encouraged to apply for higher positions. This was as opposed to 35% of males. 

“I think in biotech, there is gender parity at the entry-level, but it does tend to drop off at senior levels,” said Alice Zhang, CEO and co-founder of Verge Genomics, which is focused on developing next-generation therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases.

This lack of progress in a field that might be expected to do better – in the U.S., female medical students outnumbered men by a score of 50.5% to 49.4% as 2019 came to a close – could be couched in the embedded ethos of the biotech industry.

“Investors, for the last few years, have kind of preferred investing in experienced CEOs, and those tended to be men,” said Zhang. “The preference is also a rational response to what I would call the dark ages of biotech. In the 1990s and 2000s, there was just a really challenging financial landscape, so a lot of investors responded to that and it made a lot of sense to invest in experienced CEOs that they knew could deliver drugs across the line.”

Or, the disparity could be due to the self-perpetuating phenomenon of the old boys club.

“One of the reasons today that there’s gender disparity in new start-ups, I think, is primarily because there’s a huge bias – the VC funders are largely male,” said Verge Chief Business Officer, Jane Rhodes, Ph.D. “Because VCs largely fund teams as well as the business idea, I think there’s a lot of intrinsic bias there that’s just people funding people they see themselves in.”

Dr. Beth Seidenberg, founding managing director of Westlake Village Bio Partners, explained just one of the reasons why this is a problem.

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For more information on BioscienceLA’s Diversity & Inclusion Efforts, please visit: https://biosciencela.org/diversity-equity-inclusion