Where are the women in the top IPOs of 2019?

From Dara Khosrowshahi’s Uber to Adam Neumann’s WeWork, it’s a man’s world, still, at the top of the biggest IPOs in 2019.

Of the 10 biggest companies that have gone public or filed to go public this year, none is led by a woman, and the average number of women on their boards is less than two. Excluding WeWork, which filed its registration confidentially, the average number of women on the list of the highest paid executives, disclosed in each company’s S-1 filing, is 0.56.

Drawing on valuation data provided by PitchBook, our analysis of the gender breakdown of executives and directors focused on newly public companies with a pre-IPO valuation of at least $1 billion. For companies currently in IPO registration, we considered those with recent fundraising rounds suggesting a valuation higher than $1 billion. (Software company PagerDuty, which went public in April, has a female CEO but did not make the cutoff to be included in the top 10 companies by pre-IPO valuation.)

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