To celebrate International Women’s Day 2023we wanted to recognise the amazing women who work at Parkwalk and the women founders and innovators behind some of our portfolio companies.

This year’s International Women’s Day theme is #EmbraceEquity; the aim being to get the world talking about ‘Why Equal Opportunities Aren’t Enough’. International Women’s Day highlights women’s achievements worldwide whilst also recognising that everyone has different circumstances and that differing resources and opportunities are required to allow for equal opportunities for everyone.

Whilst progress in gender equality in the workplace has been made, there is still some way to go: women account for 47.7% of the global workforce (Team Stage, 2022), but only 19.2% of C-suite level jobs (e.g. CEO, CFO, COO, CTO, etc.) worldwide are occupied by women (Altrata Global Gender Diversity Report, 2022).

Parkwalk and Our Portfolio

We are proud to have a strong and diverse team. 64% of the team are women, including five female heads of department, including Sales, Marketing, Operations, Investor Relations and Legal.

Find out more about our team here and hear from some of them on the possibilities created by STEM degrees here.

Cassie Doherty, Investment Director at Parkwalk, said: “The evidence that diverse teams make better decisions is unquestionable. As investors we need to make sure that the composition of our investment committees reflects a diversity of background and opinions. This will ensure that we make robustly challenged investment decisions that are not subject to bias, benefiting our stakeholders and also aligning with the diversity we want within our portfolio.”

Across our portfolio of 115 live companies, we are proud to count 27 amazing female founders challenging the status quo in the deep-tech and hard science world. 51% of our portfolio companies also have at least one woman in a c-suite level role. From designing a technology that digitises the human sense of smell to developing sensing algorithms for low-power computing platforms for advanced autonomous mobility and IoT, these companies and their founders and leaders are creating meaningful impact via their ground-breaking technologies, whilst also breaking down gender inequality.

Here’s to continuing to break down gender inequality around the world and #EmbraceEquity in 2023.