As originally reported by our partner Women2.0, a global media company for aspiring and current female entrepreneurs to launch scalable, innovative ventures;
Last February we unveiled a new program named the Female Founder Fellowship, in an effort to grow the number of female technology founders by providing free Course Fees for our best female applicants. At the time, 16% of our graduates were female, and our stated goal was to double that number and ultimately graduate 175 female-led companies a year.
Well the results are in. The FFF program helped spur a 30% increase in female graduates globally in just a few months time. We have now graduated nearly 100 female founders, which account for about 21% of our total. This is roughly twice as high as most other incubators, so, in one respect we can call this program moderately successful. However, our original goal was to double the number of female graduates and get to over 30% globally, so we are still short.
To continue our drive towards 30%, and then ideally even higher, we are doing two things;
1. Global Call for Female Mentors
Despite active recruitment, only 10% of our 650+ global mentors are female. Founder Institute Mentors provide invaluable insight, feedback and support to our companies in the critical early stages, and we believe more female mentors can positively impact the long-term growth of female graduates in our program.
If you know any experienced female Founders or CEOs, please have them contact us at mentor [at] founderinstitute [dot] com for more information. Being a Mentor is both a fun and rewarding experience.
2. Announcing Female Founder Fellowship program for Fall 2011 Semesters
The Institute will subsidize the Course Fee for the most extraordinary female applicant to each of our ten Fall Semesters, listed below. Any female who applies to one of these semesters (including those who have applied already) is automatically eligible. All of the deadlines are approaching in October, so apply today at http://founderinstitute.com/join.
- Amsterdam - October 2nd Application Deadline
- Brussels - October 2nd Application Deadline
- Paris - October 2nd Application Deadline
- San Diego/ Orange County - October 9th Application Deadline
- Jakarta, Indonesia - October 9th Application Deadline
- Chicago - October 14th Application Deadline
- Hanoi, Vietnam - October 16th Application Deadline
- Singapore - October 9th Application Deadline
- New York City - October 30th Application Deadline
- Washington D.C. - October 30th Application Deadline
This is not about providing special treatment - the majority of applicants to the Founder Institute do not get accepted, and this will always be the case because we employ a quantitative Predictive Admissions Test in our application process. This test was specifically designed, and is constantly calibrated, to identify entrepreneurial personality traits and remove all forms of subjective bias. The program is simply designed to grow the number of female applicants, which will ultimately lead to more female-founded technology companies across the globe.
