Startups: Equity Is Decided in Minute One

Many gender inequalities in startups do not emerge when the company grows. They are already there much earlier. They stem from early decisions that seem practical and neutral and are often considered temporary. For example:

• How the founders distribute power and decision‑making authority from the start
• How shares are allocated
• Who assumes the first leadership roles
• How initial salaries are set
• Who gains access to the first promotions

When the startup scales, these decisions become consolidated and correcting them later becomes difficult.

In the early stages, the priority is launching products and closing funding rounds. It’s a mindset in which equity rarely enters the equation. It is postponed. The assumption is that it will be addressed later, once there is more structure and a larger team. The problem is that later almost never comes. What was meant to be temporary becomes permanent, and the implicit rules set at the beginning end up defining who holds power, who advances, and who gets sidelined.

 At Airbnb, a digital platform for lodging rentals, equity was addressed from the very first minute as a practical matter, not as an abstract value.

In 2017, the company published diversity data for its U.S. workforce and acknowledged that, without explicit rules in hiring and promotion processes, initial biases tended to reproduce themselves. From there, it introduced concrete measures: requiring diverse candidate pools before moving forward in the selection process, reviewing evaluation and promotion criteria, and setting measurable goals for workforce composition.

In 2020, it went a step further with long-term targets and diversity plans tied to each leadership team.

Buffer, a software startup for managing social media, tackled equality very early by eliminating individual salary negotiation.

In 2013, when the team was still small, the company decided to publish all salaries and set them using a common formula. The reasoning was practical: when each salary is negotiated individually, those who negotiate more aggressively or confidently —a pattern that tends to favour men— gain an advantage.

In practice, from the beginning Buffer established:

• Salaries defined by role, level, and location, not by individual negotiation
• Public, easy‑to‑understand salary bands available to the entire team
• No possibility of rewarding individual cases without modifying the system as a whole

With this model, the company closed off one of the most common pathways through which inequalities seep into young startups: salary differences that arise when there are still no rules and then persist for years.