BENGALURU: “Hello Curry”, “Hiree”, “Air Pegasus” are the recent startups in Namma Bengaluru the Indias IT capital city has tasted success with. From food joints, to IT innovations, India has witnessed great boom in the startups, primarily in cities. With novel ideas and initiatives backed by experiments and easily available finance, startups are not a farfetched dream anymore. However, as per the Economic Times study, only two percent startups have women COOs. ET recently commissioned a study of 187 startups in collaboration with talent, assessment and analytics firm Jombay on women’s role in startups and findings are revealing as compiled by Saumya Bhattacharya and Prachi Verma, Economic Times Bureau.

As per the study of all the 500 founders of the 187 startups, there are just 39 women or eight percent. None of these startups has a woman as an externally hired CEO or leader. All the women CEO’s in the survey are founders or cofounders of the start up. Only two percent of these start-ups have hired these women as Chief Operating Officers. The surveyed companies include startups that have raised venture financing in the past 24 months.

Further, close to 15 percent of startups have women heading the marketing functions while 17 percent of them are in charge of sales and business development. About 11 percent of startups have women leaders in operations and six percent in client servicing. Only seven percent of the women heading the finance while less than 11 percent have women leaders in the product and the technology divisions. The function that seems to lead in diversity is Human Resource where close to 24 percent startups have women as HR leads.

The study further has revealed that across the corporate India the percentage of women on average across the leadership roles is in single digits—eight percent for CEO and COO roles. This improves to about 14 percent for functional heads.

While ET spoke to many entrepreneurs regarding leadership role of women in the startups business, Sandeep Murthy co-founder of Lightbox Ventures said, “Hiring at the startups does not yet take into account improving the diversity numbers in leadership as there is a hurry to rope in the talent.” He further adds, “Only once the leadership pool for the startups broadens the diversity issue may be resolved and may take few years.”

Limeroad.com founder Suchi Mukerjee elucidates, “We see a lot of women in the early stages of their careers who want to come work for us, much less so at the senior levels. So effectively is the top of funnel issue for the senior leadership positions.” Elaborating further Mukerjee added since the startup eco system is centered in the cities Bengaluru and Delhi-NCR, the talent pool becomes even less limited. Recruiting the senior candidates from the cities into Delhi is a very hectic task confided Mukerjee. Many women do not want to shift to Delhi because their husbands do not want to shift to Delhi or do not want to move out from wherever they are based.

Ankita Dabas, FabFurnish co-founder said, “Startups are prone to instability and constant changes especially in their formative years.”

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