by Emily McDonnell

This year at Tech Open Air (TOA), GENDEX team members Deborah Choi, Alina Bassi, and Emily McDonnell led insightful panels on embedding DEI at the heart of organizations, and they shared actionable insights for leaders.

Here are the six key takeaways from the panels that you need to know to build better, more inclusive organisations.

1. DEFINE WHAT DEI MEANS TO YOU

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is a vast topic that encompasses many areas. Saying, as an individual or organisation, that your goal is to improve DEI or create a more equitable environment will only set you up to fail. It will also confuse those supporting you on the topic, as it’s a huge task with no clear place to start.

Developing a concrete understanding of what DEI means to you—from championing pregnant women or expectant parents in the workplace to ensuring the website is accessible for neurodivergent users—and creating solutions that directly tackle these specific problems will make your path forward crystal clear.

Deborah Choi, Entrepreneur and Co-founder of Founderland, noted that if enough of us work on these specific challenges and share the solutions we create, we can build on each other’s efforts and are much more likely to achieve the huge goal of creating a more inclusive world.

2. CLEAR METRICS ENSURE MEASURABLE SUCCESSES

Connected to this point, defining clear success metrics is essential for rolling out any DEI initiative in the workplace, because, as most of us know, what gets measured gets done.

Here, we can learn a lot from ESG reporting (Environmental, Social, and Governance), noted Emily Hoffschmidt-McDonnell, Communications Consultant. More and more ESG frameworks are developing as different sectors adopt ESG as an essential part of their corporate strategy. When goals and KPIs are too broad (e.g., being more environmentally friendly as a company), making change is difficult.

As per the previous point, determine what key metrics make sense for your business based on your vision for DEI. Track where you are today, define where you want to be a year from now, and ensure those metrics are frequently monitored.

3. DEI ISN’T JUST A TOPIC FOR DEI PROFESSIONALS

Marcus McDowell explicitly made the point that none of the panellists speaking on the topic of DEI were DEI professionals. While it’s true that all speakers are people of colour, they all work in different fields (entrepreneurship, communications, marketing, and leadership coaching).

For all the panellists, based on their lived experience and the research to date, it was clear that diverse teams and inclusive environments lead to better business outcomes. Thus, it should be a clear no-brainer to ensure that DEI is an established value across teams within organisations.

Most businesses are for-profit. To make more money with a B2C e-commerce platform, for example, you need a product that scales and resonates with as many people as possible, ideally across multiple geographies and target groups. To ensure that your product resonates, your product team, business development team, and customer support team all need a DEI understanding.

In short, we should all have an understanding that DEI is key from a human perspective to build empathy and closer connections to more individuals, but we can also influence DEI within organisations by highlighting that DEI is important for better business outcomes.

4. THERE’S A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN EQUALITY AND EQUITY

Simply put, it’s money. Sutian Dong, Co-Founder of Global Women in VC and Partner at Multitudes, highlights that we see a lot of talk about equality for women founders and people of colour founders, both in terms of fundraising as an organisation and fund, but this talk is rarely followed by actual financial support.

Sutian points out that if she had a dollar for every time an article was published about the need to invest in more female-led ideas and female founders or about the billion-dollar opportunity of investing in underrepresented people, she’d have a pretty significant fund.

If you truly believe in diversity, equity, and inclusion, you need to do more than just talk about it, host events, or post on social media. You need to invest time and resources into improving the status quo, whether that means hiring a DEI trainer for your team, finding mentors for women in your organisation, or making direct investments into businesses with diverse founders.

5. INVESTING IN DIVERSITY LEADS TO BETTER FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE IN THE LONG RUN

Nicole Büttner, Founder & CEO at Merantix Momentum, highlighted that data shows investing in women leads to better returns, which makes these conversations around why DEI should be a more prominent topic rather absurd. “According to a Forbes 2023 article, companies with female founders generate, on average, a 35 per cent higher ROI and 12 per cent higher revenues than their male peers.”

She noted that it’s not as if these women founders are asking for charity. It should be a case of, ‘do you want to earn money or not?’. There are many untapped, female-dominated markets, such as e-commerce or health topics, that have been underrepresented for decades, where there is so much potential. Women make up 50% of the population and are thus a huge target audience. Plus, the data shows women spend the majority of disposable income: “as of 2024, women control an estimated $31.8 trillion of worldwide spending and the number will continue to grow — women across the globe will control 75% of discretionary spending in the next 5 years”.

For VC, if anything, investing in statistical outliers is the job of investment managers. So, investing in people who run businesses ‘differently,’ who aren’t the traditional business founders, should happen more frequently and should come naturally to anyone who wants to be a good VC, noted Alina Bassi, Investment Manager at Ananda Impact Ventures and Co-Founder of Founderland. Women also tend to invest more in women, so getting women (and other underrepresented groups) into VC is as essential as encouraging women to incorporate businesses.

For Limited Partners (LPs) and investors in funds, it should be clear that investing in women-led funds will lead to more investment in women-led businesses, which ultimately leads to higher returns. The assumption for why this hasn’t happened more often is that these individuals are trying to mitigate risk, and there isn’t enough historical data to highlight the higher ROI of women-led funds.

The panel noted that all we can keep doing is repeating the statistics to those who will listen and take action to ensure money is invested into teams with DEI at their core.

6. STAY OPTIMISTIC

It might seem like the phrase DEI brings doom and gloom into a conversation because so much needs to change, but it’s worth remembering we have already come a long way.

Sutian shared the anecdote that in the last decade there has been a huge shift. When she founded Global Women in VC in 2015 in New York, the first membership document had 15 women on it, and she was thrilled that there were more than 10! Now, Global Women in VC has more than 6,000 members. She said, “If this is what we could achieve in 10 years, what do the next 10 years look like?”

Another reason to be optimistic is that there are now countless initiatives that target different topics that connect to DEI at large. Deborah reflected that initiatives like GENDEX (Europe’s first pan-European Gender and Diversity Index), which focuses on a specific niche, come together with other initiatives that also focus on specific problems to build on each other to take on the entire topic of DEI. So while it may seem that there is a huge problem to tackle, we are all chipping away at the mountain from different angles, and all of these small steps we are taking today will accumulate over time.

In summary, generally in the tech space, we’re on a solid path, and the path is filling up with individuals who are taking measures. Yes, there is a significant amount of work to do and many obstacles to overcome, but if we give each other space, listen, and lift each other up, we will make it.

What we can do individually is spend some time truly reflecting on what DEI means to us, what our vision is, and how we as individuals can take action. From there, we can share and find others who have a similar definition, and co-create solutions within our niche. Whatever the solution, make sure you create clear and attainable KPIs and metrics you can track against.

Ultimately, we need more brave conversations and more actions to achieve our shared goals. With that in mind, if you are a founder at a startup or scale-up we’d love to hear from you!

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