#BalanceforBetter—the importance of diversity
In honour of International Women's Day, we want to highlight the importance of female presence in the working space. Therefore, we sat down for a chat with Saskia Rademaker, our recruitment director in Amsterdam, and asked her all about her vision on the importance of diversity.
Antler
How important is diversity for Antler?
Being an HR professional I think diversity cannot be overlooked to create a healthy and thriving working environment. Teams with a good diversity ratio perform better than a team that consists of only women or men. This is also one of the key takeaways from our previous Antler programs.
In addition, our investors expect us to take this seriously. They want to invest in a fund with diverse teams, simply because they will lead to better results. All these factors ensure that diversity is very high on our agenda.
What actions do you take to drive diversity?
If anything, we have to give the right example to our founders. That's one of the reasons that our internal team has many female leaders and some highly respected female advisors and venture partners such as Ingrid Stange - a social change activist - and Victoria Vallstrom.
Furthermore, in our recruiting process, we aim for a healthy male to female ratio. Of course, we look at each founder individually based on their skills. We measure where we are and, if necessary, encourage more female entrepreneurs to apply.
Once the founders are in our program, we facilitate the co-founder matching and make sure that teams are well balanced.
Can you share some success stories of female founders?
Yeah, there are plenty! Laura and Anna from our first Singapore cohort, for example, are the proud founders of Gardore, a company that promotes the power of style to tackle the gender gap in the professional world. Isabelle and Marie Louise, who are a part of our first Stockholm program, launched #ShesGotThis , a company that uses technology to help corporates improve gender balance using an evidence-based approach.
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