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Where Are The Women? Nordic Biotech Searches For The ‘She-Suite’

Female Leaders Discuss Barriers Between Women And The Traditional CEO Position In The World’s Most Progressive Economies

 
• By Jo Shorthouse

For all its good intentions and lauded action toward gender equality, the biotech industry in Scandinavia and the Nordics has a female CEO rate hovering around 23%. While the number of women entering academia, innovative companies and laboratories is healthy, gender equality in the C-suite leaves a lot to be desired. 

Nordic Leaders, Jessica Martinsson, Helena Strigard, Kara Brotemarkle
L-R: Helena Strigard, Jessica Martinsson and Kara Brotemarkle • Source: Shutterstock

Published last year, the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap report found that Iceland, Finland, Sweden and Norway were leading the charge in gender equality. It should follow, then, that these countries must have a high rate of female CEOs in their respectively thriving biotech industries. On closer inspection, this is not the case.

Unpublished figures from SwedenBio show that female CEOs amount to 23% in the country, largely on par with the wider biotech industry in which 20% of CEOs are women, according...

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