{"id":808,"date":"2019-10-08T16:49:34","date_gmt":"2019-10-08T20:49:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/?p=808"},"modified":"2019-12-02T08:35:45","modified_gmt":"2019-12-02T13:35:45","slug":"a-biased-sampling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/2019\/10\/08\/a-biased-sampling\/","title":{"rendered":"A biased sampling"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>On a whim the other day, I scraped the &#8220;portfolio&#8221; page on the websites of three of the large venture capital firms in Kendall Square (<a href=\"https:\/\/atlasventure.com\/\">Atlas Venture<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.flagshippioneering.com\/\">Flagship Pioneering<\/a>, and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thirdrockventures.com\">Third Rock Ventures)<\/a> to generate a list of 162 biotech companies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The first thing I noticed was that the company names seem, disproportionately, to start with the letter &#8216;A.&#8217; If company names were distributed like English words, the most common starting letter would be &#8216;T&#8217;.  Instead, for whatever reason, we see a skew towards A, C, and S.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"787\" height=\"575\" src=\"https:\/\/dwan.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/Screen-Shot-2019-10-06-at-6.17.00-PM.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-809\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>If we wanted to, we could come up with some sort of an explanation for this phenomenon. My personal bet is that there is a benefit to being at the top of the stack in competitive evaluations for funding. <a href=\"https:\/\/economix.blogs.nytimes.com\/2011\/04\/14\/time-and-judgment\/\">A famous study of Israeli parole boards<\/a> tracked judges becoming steadily less merciful as they got hungry and tired. I&#8217;m willing to bet that venture capitalists exhibit similar behavior. If that&#8217;s true, and if people (like me) tend to sort things alphabetically, then we would expect the list to be enriched for the likes of Acceleron, Afferent, Agios, and Annovation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"486\" height=\"381\" src=\"https:\/\/dwan.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/Screen-Shot-2019-10-08-at-10.48.42-AM.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-816\"\/><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>Conversations about bias in the workplace can be stressful. Even bringing up the subject can feel like an accusation and incite a rush to judgement. We get so caught up in <em><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">what it means<\/span><\/em> and <em><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">what we should do<\/span><\/em>, that we lose sight of <em><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">what is actually there<\/span><\/em>. The rest of this post explores gender ratios in biotech leadership.  I encourage you to relax away from judgement for a moment and merely consider the numbers as a sort of intellectual curiosity &#8211; as if we were talking about lexical anomalies .<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Founder Effects<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>I went through the list in alphabetical order, looking up the people who got credit for &#8220;founding&#8221; each company. It turns out that &#8220;founder&#8221; is not terribly well defined. I included all of:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Whoever <a href=\"https:\/\/www.crunchbase.com\/\">Crunchbase<\/a> said was the founder &#8211; these turn out to mostly be people from the venture firms<\/li><li>Everybody mentioned as a founder on the company website<\/li><li>Anybody who got a mention as a &#8220;Founding Whatever&#8221; in launch announcements in industry news sources like <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fiercebiotech.com\">Fierce Biotech<\/a>, or <a href=\"https:\/\/xconomy.com\/\">Xconomy<\/a>.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Then I added a column and tagged each person according to a guess at their gender. I took gendered names and pronouns (he \/ her) at face value. In cases where I had any doubt, I dug around on the web until I found a bio that used a gendered pronoun. I didn&#8217;t find even one person with nonbinary pronouns or presentation in their professional persona. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>With a couple days work, I got through the first 67 companies (all the way to &#8220;Fulcrum&#8221;). In those companies, I found 190 people listed as founders: 177 men and 13 women (7%).  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Remember, no judgement, no explanations. We&#8217;re just counting. In this case, we&#8217;re double counting.  We have some <em><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">incredibly<\/span><\/em> prolific founders, like Noubar Afeyan of Flagship Pioneering who shows up in 9 of these 67 companies.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The plot below spreads out those gender numbers by year.  It suffers a bit from the small sample size, but &#8211; if I squint my eyes &#8211; I can begin to imagine a couple of trends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"878\" height=\"637\" src=\"https:\/\/dwan.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/Screen-Shot-2019-10-08-at-1.53.45-PM.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-817\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Leadership<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Out of my list of 67 companies, 47 of them are still doing business under their original name (including 24 IPOs). I went to their websites and scraped the names and titles out of the pages dedicated to the leadership teams, the boards of director, and the scientific advisors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I took some liberties with the titles. Even though Nick Leschly of Bluebird Bio is listed as &#8220;Chief Bluebird,&#8221; I still lumped him in with the CEOs. For people with multiple titles, I selected the highest ranking one. I also exercised a bit of judgement and combined different versions of what seem objectively to be the same role (Biology vs. Biological Sciences, for example). I counted 16 distinct ranks (chief through assistant) and 78 distinct areas (science, law, HR, and so on). <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Out of 347 people listed on the &#8220;leadership&#8221; pages, 244 are men and 103 are women (30%).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><figure class=\"aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"408\" height=\"391\" src=\"https:\/\/dwan.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/Screen-Shot-2019-10-08-at-2.12.06-PM.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-818\"\/><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>Gender distribution varies widely with area of responsibility.  I didn&#8217;t find any women in leadership roles for data or &#8220;tech,&#8221; nor did I find very many men leading human resources or project \/ portfolio teams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"871\" height=\"627\" src=\"https:\/\/dwan.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/Screen-Shot-2019-10-08-at-2.28.38-PM.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-819\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Board<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Boards of Directors vary widely from company to company. Most boards are made up of representatives of the firms who have made significant investments, a senior executive or two from within the company, and a selection of industry veterans. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Out of the 286 board members in my little study, 237 of them were men and 47 were women (17%) &#8211; which is very similar to the gender representation I found among CEOs.  Out of 35 &#8220;chair&#8221; positions, I found 33 men and two women (6%).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"871\" height=\"627\" src=\"https:\/\/dwan.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/Screen-Shot-2019-10-08-at-3.04.10-PM-1.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-821\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>The numbers were similar for the 153 people listed on the scientific and clinical advisory boards. Out of that total, 139 were men and 14 were women (9%).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">So What?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>As I said at the beginning, these numbers are, by themselves, neither good nor bad.  They are simply a snapshot of a tiny slice of an incredibly dynamic industry. For all that, gender representations like 7%, 9%, 17%, and even 30% do seem to beg the question, <em><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">what&#8217;s going on here?<\/span><\/em>   This is pretty far from an unbiased selection out of the human population. Scientists are constantly generating hypotheses and ideas for how to test them &#8211; I feel that some of that intellectual rigor might be valuable here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My plan is to continue to parse, sort, sift, and learn. I&#8217;ve got 100 more company websites to scrape, and a few more low-hanging analyses to run. I expect to generate at least a couple more blog posts from this data, which will hopefully spark some downstream conversations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At the very least, I hope to answer the question of whether or not the women leaders are mostly hanging out in the companies towards the latter half of the alphabet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As always, I&#8217;m deeply interested in your thoughts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On a whim the other day, I scraped the &#8220;portfolio&#8221; page on the websites of three of the large venture capital firms in Kendall Square (Atlas Venture, Flagship Pioneering, and Third Rock Ventures) to generate a list of 162 biotech companies. The first thing I&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-equity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=808"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1344,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/808\/revisions\/1344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwan.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}