How female are European B2C internet companies? The Big Search and Statista tried to answer this question by analyzing 284 growth-stage and late-stage companies across the continent. Together, these firms employ 1,470 C-level executives in Europe, excluding managing directors. Of the companies surveyed, 37 percent have at least one woman in a C-suite role, representing 331 female executives overall.
Women are most strongly represented in people-focused leadership positions, accounting for 79 percent of such roles. They also hold a significant share of customer-focused positions (52.9 percent) and legal and compliance (39.7 percent) roles. Women who have built career pipelines in HR, communications, law and regulatory disciplines have reached near parity in education and professional training over recent decades. That means the talent pool for these roles is wider than for any other C-level roles. By contrast, women remain under-represented in CPTO (15.6 percent), CISO (11.1 percent), and CTO (3.6 percent) roles. Similarly, only 9.7 percent of European B2C internet CEOs are women.
Structural factors largely drive this disparity. Technical leadership pipelines continue to be constrained by the historically male-dominated nature of STEM education and careers, resulting in a relatively small pool of senior female candidates. And for the CEO role, the gap is cumulative. Chief executives are often recruited from functions where women are already underrepresented, causing the talent pool to narrow further at each successive management level.
