From Participation to Ownership: Bulgaria’s Women in Deep Tech Paradox

A BESCO perspective, with insights from Nick Stefanov, MSEng., drawing on his experience at EVN Bulgaria and Schneider Electric.

Since joining the European Union in 2007, Bulgaria has never sent a male European Commissioner to Brussels. Every Bulgarian who has served in the Commission has been a woman, and one of them, Kristalina Georgieva, now runs the International Monetary Fund. Women accounted for 47.3% of Bulgaria’s scientists and engineers in 2024, against 40.5% across the EU. And yet Bulgaria is classified as an Emerging Innovator, ranked 26th among Member States in the 2026 European Innovation Scoreboard, with innovation performance at 48.9% of the EU average.

That combination is the Bulgarian paradox, and it reframes the question. The country does not appear to suffer primarily from a shortage of women capable of doing deep tech. It suffers from a shortage of environments in which scientific and engineering capability – female or male – is converted into intellectual property, startups, founder equity and globally scalable companies. Bulgaria’s challenge is increasingly less about whether women enter technology, and more about whether technical talent ends up owning it.

There is a historical reason Bulgaria starts this conversation from a different place than much of Western Europe. For several generations, women were deliberately integrated into technical education and skilled professional work. That system had serious shortcomings and should not be romanticised, but one lasting consequence was normalisation: a girl choosing electronics or chemical engineering in the 1970s or 1980s was not making a statement about gender, she was entering an established professional route. “Women in STEM” often arrives in Bulgaria as new policy vocabulary for a social reality the country normalised decades ago.

The legacy is still visible in professional life, including in sectors where we would not expect occupational history to favour women. “In my years at EVN Bulgaria, female managerial authority was entirely unremarkable,” says Nick Stefanov, who spent years in the Bulgarian energy sector before moving to Schneider Electric. His analysis of the company’s internal organisational records shows that once field operations are set aside, management was close to gender-balanced, with women holding board and senior positions across several entities. Field operations were the clear exception – a management pipeline fed by electricians, technicians and dispatchers, professions with an overwhelmingly male recruitment base. Occupational history can create a gender imbalance without creating a governance barrier.

None of this proves that Bulgaria has achieved gender equality. It has not, and women founders
may well face additional frictions in accessing capital, networks and credibility. Those effects
deserve to be measured rather than assumed away. But in Bulgaria they sit on top of a more
fundamental constraint, and it helps to think in three stages: participation, leadership and
ownership. Bulgaria performs comparatively well on the first two. The third is where the picture
weakens sharply. Deep tech requires research institutions and laboratories, credible technology
transfer, defensible IP, investors able to price technological rather than merely commercial risk,
industrial testbeds, sophisticated first customers and patient capital. Bulgaria is weak across too
much of that chain. The problem is not that capable women are waiting outside the door of
technology. It is that too few doors exist between science, engineering, entrepreneurship, capital
and industrialisation.

At BESCO – The Bulgarian Entrepreneurial Association, this is why we increasingly look at the
question through the broader innovation system. Our work on technology transfer, access to
early-stage capital and policies that make Bulgaria more attractive for innovative companies is
part of the same equation. If more research becomes intellectual property, more intellectual
property becomes companies, and more companies reach capital and international markets,
then the women already present in Bulgaria’s technical talent pool gain far more opportunities to
become founders and owners. Corporations have a role here too: acting as first customers,
testbeds and scaling partners rather than waiting for Bulgarian technologies to be validated
abroad. Public procurement can create credible first markets.

None of this argues for doing less on access, representation and the barriers women still face. It
argues for doing something in addition. And it may be Bulgaria’s most useful contribution to the
European conversation: participation is not the same as ownership. A country can normalise
women as engineers, scientists and leaders and still fail to turn that human capital into globally
competitive technology companies.

Bulgaria’s next challenge is therefore not simply to put more women into deep tech. It is to build
enough deep tech for the women already there to create, own and scale.

This article was written in collaboration with BESCO – The Bulgarian Enrepreneurial Association. For more information about their work visit BESCO’s website.

Find out more about the project here!