22.5% of Europe's Growth and Late-Stage B2C Internet C-Levels Are Women by The Big Search & Statista
We partnered with Statista and mapped 284 growth and late-stage European B2C internet companies.
Every time gender diversity in tech comes up, the conversations are the same. Women represent X% of the tech workforce. Leadership isn’t improving. The trend is that nothing is moving. But numbers are always broad and lack a sector or level cut.
We wanted a sharper one: the share of women at C-level in the European B2C internet sector. Think of executives like Catherine Faiers at Moonpig, Anna Dimitrova at Zalando, Francesca Carlesi at Revolut, or Laura Hagan at Deliveroo.
So, we partnered with Statista and mapped 284 growth and late-stage European B2C internet companies:
Series C through IPO (and Acquisition), each with 100+ employees
Across e-commerce, marketplace, food and delivery, mobility, travel, gaming, media, wellness, fashion, consumer fintech, consumer edtech, home and living, kids, sports, dating, and music.
Inside those 284 companies, we identified 1,470 current C-level executives based in Europe, excluding Managing Directors.
37% of those companies have at least one female C-level. That also means 63% don’t have a single woman at C-level…
In absolute terms, that represents 331 women. As a share of the total leadership pool: 22.5%.
For the rest of the piece, we break down which countries, functions, and sub-sectors are pulling the average up and which ones are dragging it down.
We also spoke with some of those female executives: Ebony Simone Morczinek, Founder of Weinstock Partners, ex-CFO Blacklane and ex-CEO Europe Marley Spoon; Annika in der Beek, Chief People Officer at Statista; Bianca Zwart, Chief Strategy Officer at Bunq; and Amandine Durr, Chief Product Officer at Back Market.
Thank you for contributing!
This article was compiled in collaboration with the Consumer Practice at The Big Search. If you’re interested in leadership and talent trends, looking to hire a Consumer leader, or simply want to discuss the findings, feel free to reach out to sahar@thebigsearch.com or Sahar Powell (PhD).
The UK hosts the most female C-levels, but…
The UK accounts for one-third of the entire female C-level pool. But volume isn’t the same as share. Among countries with at least 10 female executives, the Netherlands has the highest representation (31.9%)1. Two things explain it.
The first is structural. The Dutch Senate’s gender diversity legislation requires men and women to each hold at least one-third of supervisory board seats at listed Dutch companies. Any appointment that fails to move the ratio in the right direction is legally null and void.
The second is cultural. Flexible working is a baseline expectation, and it keeps women in the C-level pipeline through early parenthood. There is also a hiring mindset that ignores the usual filters.
Booking.com alone has four women at C-level. The company was one of the few organisations at that scale to previously have a female CEO, Gillian Tans, which surely helped set the right tone and culture. On top of that, its parental leave policy is quite generous: 22 weeks for both parents.
Germany ranks at the bottom despite having the second-largest pool of female executives, with only 15.8%. Societal expectations around the “caretaking” role of mothers remain strong, and flexible work for senior leaders is far less normalised than in the Netherlands or Sweden. Consequently, the drop-off in career progression at the management-to-executive level is more pronounced in Germany than in other countries.
People & HR leadership is the most female-represented C-level role
Women are most represented in people-focused (79%), customer-focused (52.9%), and legal/compliance (39.7%) C-level roles2. Women have built career pipelines in HR, law, and communications, and legal and regulatory disciplines have reached gender parity in education and professional training for a while now. That means the talent pool for these roles is wider than for any other C-level roles.
However, women remain under-represented in CPTO (15.6%), CISO (11.1%), and CTO (3.6%) roles. Similarly, only 9.7% of European B2C internet CEOs are women.
For technical roles, STEM programmes have historically been male-dominated, leaving a thin pool of senior female technical candidates.
And for the CEO role, the gap is cumulative. CEOs are drawn from the other functions, where women are already under-represented. Each feeder function loses women at every leadership level, and the pool shrinks at every stage.
Consumer fintech attracts the most female C-level executives
Consumer fintech and mobility & travel are the largest employer sectors in our pool. However, no single sector pulls away in representation the way the Netherlands does in country share or the way people-focused functions do in role share. The spread between sub-sectors is narrower.
Still, a few stand out above the 22.5% average.
Other e-commerce/marketplace (26.1%) and proptech (26%) companies have the highest proportions of female C-levels. The property industry has long been male-dominated, but tech companies like AVIV Group (through its portfolio), idealista, and Holidu are giving women more room at the top.
Wellness & health is just behind (24.2%), driven largely by FemTech. Many of these companies, Flo among them, were founded specifically to solve female-centric health problems and have a higher concentration of female C-levels than other sub-sectors do.
However, two main sub-sectors are below 20%. Entertainment is at 17.6%, weighed down primarily by gaming, where the gender imbalance in development teams and leadership is well-documented. Consumer EdTech is at 16.3%. Despite education being a female-heavy industry, the tech-platform layer has skewed toward founders and executives from engineering and product backgrounds, which remain male-dominated pipelines.
Overall, the numbers speak for themselves. 63% of companies don’t have a single woman at C-level, and women make up 22.5% of the total European B2C internet leadership pool.
Initiatives and movements are emerging at national and European levels, but their effects are mixed for now. Germany has its own version of supervisory board legislation but remains at the lower end of the pool – even though its new Labour Market Strengthening Act introduces tax-privileged bonuses in 2026 for employees moving from part-time to full-time work, from which women make up the majority. Sweden has “soft law” gender quotas with similarly uneven results.
The female top executives we spoke to agreed on one thing: the future of representation is less about predicting and more about building the pool. Forecasts and timelines matter, but they don’t move the needle on their own. What moves it is the deliberate work of shaping pipelines, sponsorship, and cultures that let diverse talent actually reach the top.
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The UK (25.3%), Germany (15.8%), France (22.9%), Sweden (27.6%), the Netherlands (31.9%), and Spain (28%).
CPeO: Chief People Officer; CFO: Chief Financial Officer; COO: Chief Operating Officer; CMO: Chief Marketing Officer; CEO: Chief Executive Officer; CCO: Chief Commercial Officer; CLO: Chief Legal Officer; CPO: Chief Product Officer; CISO: Chief Information & Security Officer; CCSO: Chief Customer Success Officer; CTO: Chief Technology Officer; CSO: Chief Strategy Officer; CPTO: Chief Product & Technology Officer; CDO: Chief Digital Officer.