Assessing progress in biotech’s gender balance

Hodgson, John

doi:10.1038/s41587-019-0367-9

Correspondence
Published: 19 December 2019

Assessing progress in biotech’s gender balance

John Hodgson¹

Nature Biotechnology volume 38, pages 19–22 (2020)Cite this article

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To the Editor — As mentioned in your June editorial¹, US lobby group the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) recently set targets to try to raise diversity (of gender, race, sexual identity and internationality) within executive management groups and boards of directors of biotech companies. By 2025, it wants to raise the representation of non-male, non-white, non-straight and non-US personnel on executive teams and boards of directors across member companies to 50% and 30%, respectively. Reaching such ambitious targets quickly will require tactics that biotech management teams themselves, rather than legislators, can implement. Here I present the results of a survey of the gender diversity of management teams at 608 publicly listed biotech companies across the globe. Data from the survey suggest a slow improvement in female representation since 2014. They also indicate that quotas have been effective in raising the proportion of female directors on biotech boards in the six European countries where they have been in effect. From 2020, California, a US state with a large number of biotech companies, will require that all publicly held companies have at least one woman on their boards of directors. Thus I expect that female representation in US biotech boardrooms will continue to increase.

Data from The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2018² indicate that women represent just 25–28% of the global workforce in industries such as manufacturing, energy and software, and only 22% in the advanced technical arena of artificial intelligence. Biotechnology is not like that. At least in the United States, data from 2017 indicate that similar numbers of men and women enter biotech³; the same is also true of the US pharmaceutical and medical products industries⁴. Indeed, a brief survey I carried out from May to July 2019 of the most recent corporate literature (annual reports, 10-K filings, corporate social responsibility reports, etc.) of 25 publicly listed US and European companies confirms that the proportion of female employees ranges from 37% to 67% (see Supplementary Data). Collectively, the workforce of these 25 firms is 52% female. Within this sample, then, biotech is a gender-equal-opportunity hirer.

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