Words of Wisdom from Marrone Bio Founder Pam Marrone

Women are in high demand in the Agri-FoodTech sector, but, not easy to find and hire.

Women in top leadership roles are recognized for bringing a diversity of vision and execution strategy crucial to startup success. Some of the leading companies in agriculture — Land O’Lakes, FMC and Certis Biologicals— have women in CEO or top leadership roles.  And there has been a plethora of woman-founded Agri-FoodTech startups. Check out Root Applied Sciences, Inari, Inner Plant, Pheronym, Trace Genomics and BrightSeed, to name a few.

For those women that have moved into Agri-FoodTech leadership roles, this has created a novel scenario for women in the workforce — on average women are commanding higher salaries than their male counterparts. Our recently conducted salary survey, the first of its kind for the Agri-FoodTech sector, found that seven out of 10 top paid executives were women.

Suffice it to say, women in Agri-FoodTech aren’t just breaching the glass ceiling they are obliterating it!

This is all great news if you’re a woman looking at career options in Agri-FoodTech. But, our salary survey also revealed that women are in very short supply for these jobs. Out of 385 executive leaders surveyed, only 7% were female. Agri-FoodTech startups are looking to add female talent to their company’s leadership roles, but they aren’t having much luck finding them.

So, that begs the question —What can Agri-FoodTech startups do to find, attract and secure women for their executive team?

I reached out to best qualified women I could imagine to answer this pressing question — Pam Marrone, founder and long-time CEO (she recently moved into the director position) of Marrone Bio Innovations, a publicly-traded company ag-biologics company. Marrone, arguably the first female powerhouse in the Agri-FoodTech sector, is active on many start-up boards.

Marrone offered up some great advice (and occasional choice words!) for Agri-FoodTech startups to consider in their search for female talent.

Pam Marrone on Finding, Hiring and Keeping Female Talent

Pam Says Try Harder (And Stop Thinking Like Men

I’ve gone through many recruiting cycles with companies I advise on. They check their networks, they advertise, the board checks with their networks, the executive director pulls together a pool of candidates and says, “we can’t find enough women.” Or, the recruiters say the same thing.

Well, that’s not good enough. The women are there, you’re just not looking the right place and accessing the right networks. If you’re using the same old, male-dominated networks, you’re going to get the same old, male-dominated results.

Access networks where the women are! Association for Women in Science (AWIS) has a fantastic job board. Or there’s the Society of Women Engineers. There are a number of women in STEM and minorities in STEM groups. All those organizations have networks you should be searching in your recruitment search.

Remember, women network differently than men. Men are competitive in a networking situation, it’s a contest for who speaks first. Women listen and they want to understand before they speak up. For women in a male-dominated group, it can feel very domineering. So, no surprise, women naturally flock to different networking places then men do.

Dig deeper, stop thinking like men and look for candidates where the women are.

Pam Says Create a Culture Women Will Want to Work In

Women look for a company culture that welcomes them.

They will look to your top management’s commitment to diversity, both of gender and underrepresented minorities. Your mission, your values and your vision that drive that culture are critical.

Not just women but any candidate who wants to work for a mission-driven company wants to know, what are the manifestations of that culture? How are you reinforcing it? You must be able to answer that and give examples. If you can’t, women will assume hiring them is just lip-service.

Can they take time off for a doctor’s appointment and not be docked? Do you offer flex time? Do you have family-friendly work policies? How do you promote people or what you even thought about it? What is your career development path? Can they gain new skills?

Also, what does the company do for fun or for employee socializing? If your primary company downtime is engaged in sports games and going golfing, then you’ll likely have narrowed the field considerably when it comes to female candidates. 

Even in an early stage startup, women want to know how your company values people and how their contributions will be recognized. They will consider the money offered, but it isn’t always the top priority. Creating a culture that values teamwork, diversity of thought and integrity are important. 

Pam Says Blast Away the Old Agricultural Stereotypes

There are many female-friendly career options in Agri-FoodTech that are agriculture-adjacent — ag tech, ag bio, climate science, plant biology. Woman can go into genomics, work in data science, robotics or AI.

That’s a lot different than when I got out of school. At that time there really wasn’t any career path for women in agriculture. It was a very heavily male-dominated sector and many of the agro-chemical companies would move you every two to three years to different territories, not a family-friendly job for a woman.

Things have changed a lot with Agri-FoodTech, but agriculture still has a serious image problem. Young job seekers often see agriculture as a traditionally male-dominated, stodgy, conservative industry that isn’t welcome to diversity. And unfortunately, those stereotypes still play out.

A few years ago, I was shadowed by a very smart young Chinese American woman attending Cornell University. She came with me to a grower’s meeting. We sat down at lunch and the very first words out of the farmer’s mouth were “Where are you from? Are you an immigrant? Are you a citizen?” Holy moly, I was so embarrassed! Even worse, that’s not the first time that sort of thing has happened.

These bright young candidates experience something like that, and they quickly move into pharma and work in drug discovery or healthcare. Why wouldn’t they? There’s diversity and women in the sector already and they are further down the path in terms of progressiveness than agriculture. It can make it hard to attract women into agricultural jobs, let alone keep them.

Agri-FoodTech is making a lot of inroads for women, but the agriculture sector as a whole still has lot of catching up to do.

Pam Says Don’t Gaslight Your Female Talent

It took me until my late 50s to really start to feel comfortable with who I am and to recognize the strength of my vision, experience, knowledge and abilities. That was because I spent so much of my early career being whipsawed by my employers and colleagues telling me how I was supposed to act or behave as a woman in the industry.

I was told I was too strong. Too opinionated. I must be careful of the impressions I made on people. A boss at Monsanto told me I needed to soften my rough petticoats!

I ended up always worried about how I was perceived. Did I offend somebody? This constant self-critique hampered my decision making. It took me a long time to realize that people use this technique to make you question yourself. It is so common for someone to say a woman is difficult if she has a different opinion.

Especially for female founders, they have to have confidence to believe in their own expertise.

I made bad decisions because I let other people undermine my confidence. Now I strongly counsel young women executives to believe in what they bring to the table, whether that’s as a founder or on the team. Learn from me, don’t compromise the capabilities of the women you hire for your team. Not only will you be sabotaging the reason you hired them, but young women are also wiser than I was about this early on in my career, they won’t stick around if they’re being gaslighted.

Overall, this is unprecedented time for women entrepreneurs. I’m seeing so many women-led startups, it’s incredible. I think women see the startup culture as an opportunity for them to take control their own future. That’s an extremely attractive proposition for a lot of future female talent! 

Thanks Pam for your great words of advice!