EUROPE’S DATA GAP

Christina Caljé shares her views in this article delving into the complicated issue around the lack of data when it comes to ethnicity and gender non-binary diversity. Europe has a massive problem: the data doesn’t exist.

Backed by the Financial Times, TNW is a technology news company.

Selection from the article:

The data bottleneck

One founder familiar with Europe’s data diversity gap is Christina Caljé. A born-and-raised New Yorker, Caljé started her career at Goldman Sachs in London before starting her own tech consultancy to help US-based web and app development companies expand to Europe. She was then COO of Peerby, a Dutch B2C company working to promote more sustainable consumption, before becoming cofounder and CEO of smart video platform Autheos, which has since been sold.

As a Black Latinx female founder, Caljé refers to herself as “an outlier, in a positive sense,” and she sees Europe, and the Netherlands in particular, as being “five to 10 years behind” the USA in the ethnic diversity conversation, in part because of the lack of data.

“There’s not really a conversation yet from a professional perspective [on ethnicity],” she tells TNW. “Is the diversity of this country really being represented in the leading economic sectors such as technology?”

Caljé was also the only founder from the Netherlands accepted to the Google for Startups Immersion Program for Black Founders in 2020, which she said provided her valuable resources and a supportive network of founders to talk to. She says that when she raised a discussion about the need for a similar program for other minority founders back in the Netherlands, particularly helping to address the underrepresentation of VC funding, the absence of related data on ethnicity quickly became a bottleneck.

When you talk to the stakeholders who would be well-positioned to try to lead, launch, or fund those programmes, you always get down to this issue: “Well, is it really a problem here in the Netherlands? Are we that diverse? We don’t really have the data around it, so we can’t really diagnose this as an actual problem to address.”

Because there are certain legal limitations around capturing the demographic makeup from an ethnic perspective in these economic sectors, you can’t necessarily point to numbers to illustrate the problem, you can only speak anecdotally. And that’s not always convincing enough for the people who are the ones with the influence to create change.

Caljé is similarly working on a diversity data collection project, in partnership with Google for Startups and Andy Davis, ​​angel investor at Atomico and ex-Director of Backstage Capital London, which she hopes will not only shine a light on the black founder experience across Europe, but also turn into a supportive network for founders.

“​​The goal is to also showcase the innovation, and that this as an overlooked commercial opportunity… it’s meant as a first step towards creating a cross border network for Black and brown founders, and investors who want to invest in them,” she says.