Imposter syndrome, struggles with work-life balance and a lack of confidence are still some of the chief barriers women in biotech face when climbing the C-suite ladder, according to a survey by U.K. biotech trade group BioIndustry Association.
For CEOs, there’s even more holding them back.
“Investors and boards were the key barriers, or certainly the key perceived barriers, for [female] CEOs and the continuation of their careers at that level,” said BIA managing director Jane Wall. “This being because most investors and boards are heavily male dominated.”
Despite running a “Women in Biotech” network for years and a mentoring program for future leaders, BIA realized that if the problem was at the board level, more was needed to move the needle.
“We've seen the tiniest of moves in terms of representation, which we don't consider to be progress.”
Jane Wall
Managing director, BioIndustry Association
With that goal in mind, BIA teamed up with AstraZeneca, Murray Edwards College at the University of Cambridge and Deloitte to launch “She Steers,” a program to boost representation among women on biotech boards and help them make a greater impact. The program’s first cohort are women taking on their first non-executive director (NED) board role or looking to strengthen their impact in an existing one.
“We've got about 26 absolutely astounding women signed up to that program,” Wall said. “We're looking to make a difference with that cohort.”
A female leadership plateau
Although once on the rise, the number of female biotech CEOs has now stagnated while NED representation has declined.
“That was a surprise to everyone,” Wall said. “We were expecting it to be a steady increase, but in fact, what we saw was it plateauing.”
BIA released its first report about women in biotech C-suite leadership a year ago, and this year’s follow-up demonstrated that lack of overall progress, including a marginal increase in female CEOs from 18.3% to 18.7%.
“What we've seen is the continuation of that plateau,” Wall said. “We've seen the tiniest of moves in terms of representation, which we don't consider to be progress.”
The biggest growth this year was for chief business officer roles, which jumped from 26% to 34% from the year before in representation among women. But that’s reflective of the way women seem to be disproportionately occupying operational support roles, the report stated. Likewise, few women are in technical leadership positions, with chief scientific officer representation at 20% and chief technology officer representation at 14%.
The story is similar when it comes to fundraising.
The total capital raised by female-led companies increased by 15% last year. But that amount was concentrated into the top three series A fundraising rounds, including Draig Therapeutics, which pulled in $140 million.
“If you take those deals out of the equation, then that does still show that it's a real struggle for women to raise capital,” Wall said.
And although the value of female-led early-stage VC funding shot up thanks to those three deals, the total volume of fundraising rounds involving female leaders dropped to just 6%.
Digging deeper
BIA started investigating how women are represented in the biotech C-suite after a 2023 survey showed that although men and women entered the industry in equal numbers, they weren’t rising through the ranks equally.
“By the time you got to senior leadership levels, representation of women was dropping off fairly significantly,” Wall said.
It’s a pattern that’s repeated across industries. A 2022 study from MIT Sloan found that female employees are less likely to be promoted than their male counterparts, despite outperforming them and being less likely to quit. And although women’s job performances were typically rated higher, their “potential” was rated lower, resulting in female employees being 14% less likely to be promoted than men.
Wall said that rather than strategizing ways to get more women into the sector at early stages, BIA’s research made it “clear that there was a barrier or set of barriers at the senior levels.”
Although BIA’s reports focused on U.K.-based companies, there’s a similar pattern across the pond.
“If you look across the U.K. and U.S., there's not a single C-suite role that crosses the 35% representation mark,” Wall said. “This suggests a bit of a structural cap that is persisting across those geographies.”
Wall also pointed to “an additional set of headwinds” in the form of anti-DEI rhetoric that’s prompted U.S. companies to scrap diversity initiatives or change the language around them to deflect attention.
Amid these shifts, initiatives like “She Steers” will be more critical if the biotech industry intends to knock down the systemic roadblocks that prevent women from entering the C-suite, Wall said.
“We have some great examples of female-led companies who are outperforming, which is amazing to see. And we want to promote those as widely as we can,” Wall said. “But also, let's not ignore the structural barriers that still exist.
