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Last year, female founders received about 2 percent of venture capital funding — and the numbers are moving in the wrong direction. While the average investment in companies led by men jumped 12 percent, to $10.9 million, the average investment in companies led by women dropped 26 percent, to $4.5 million. Statistics tell us that funders award women founders just a quarter of the funding they ask for. Male founders, meanwhile, are getting half.

only 7 percent of partners at the top 100 venture firms are women. Fewer than two in five firms had even a single female partner.

there is a lot of evidence that unconscious biases are impacting the way female founders are received. Consider, for example, the finding that investors tend to describe young male entrepreneurs as “promising,” and young female entrepreneurs as “inexperienced.” Or that the managing partner of one of Silicon Valley’s leading VC firms admitted that one of the things he looks for when deciding whether to invest is an entrepreneur who fits the Gates, Bezos, Andreessen or Google model — which is to say, “white male nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford.”

A small but growing number of women are forming women-only investment networks, or raising starter capital in other ways.

With venture capital's big money bro-culture behavior coming to light, there’s a new fear, mingled with the relief: That, in reaction, male financiers will avoid women founders altogether. There’s talk of some men following the "Mike Pence rule," referring to the vice president's comment years ago that he does not eat alone with any women other than his wife. 

Lisa Curtis, founder and CEO of food start-up Kuli Kuli, says she has already heard of investors canceling meetings with female founders and she's worried. "I think that's the wrong reaction," Curtis says. 

A California state senator says she will introduce legislation to clarify legal protections for entrepreneurs facing sexual harassment. State Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson says the proposal, which she revealed Thursday, is in response to “recent and stunning” allegations by women entrepreneurs of harassment by venture capitalists.

The proposal would amend California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act, which prohibits sexual discrimination at California businesses, to clarify that it covers sexual harassment in relationships between entrepreneurs and potential investors. Current law specifies doctor-patient and attorney-client relationships, but does not explicitly mention entrepreneurs and potential investors.

Equal Rights Advocates, a national nonprofit that champions gender rights in workplaces and schools, will support the measure. The organization has previously worked with Jackson to successfully strengthen California’s Equal Pay Law.

According to the study, published Tuesday in the journal Venture Capital, having even one woman on a company’s team makes them far less likely to get funding than an entirely male one. In fact, an all male team is about four times more likely to get funding than teams with any women on them.

it is quite surprising that women are still, practically speaking, shut out of the market for venture capital funding, both as CEOs and participants of executive teams.”

recent events are the latest in a string of high profile conflicts between venture capital’s idealized version of itself as a meritocratic haven for free-thinkers of all stripes, and the more unfortunate reality of a business beset by the same problems of systemic privilege as any other that involves massive monied interests and a highly selective group of (mostly) hyper-educated, white, male elites as its gatekeepers.

venture capital’s problems with women (and with people of color, and with sexual orientation) extend far beyond the obviously terrible behavior exposed in the excellent reporting done by The New York Times (which would have been impossible without the brave entrepreneurs who came forward to speak on the record about the sexual misconduct they had to confront).

the study published earlier this week in the Harvard Business Review is so important. In it, the authors examined the ways that investors pose different questions to the men and women they’re vetting for potential investment dollars… and the ways that those questions and their responses impact financing.

The cities with the shrimpiest numbers of female founders, by percentage, are Silicon Valley's Palo Alto and San Jose, California.

The cities in the United States where the combined economic clout of female founders is growing fastest are San Antonio; Portland, Oregon; Houston; Atlanta; and Riverside, California.

Only 10 percent of startups which raised Series A last year had female founders. Today's venture capital environment clocks some 305 active funds over $100 million. These funds collectively put $114 billion to work. Ninety percent of it never sees a female founder.

Male bias? That was not the Valley’s fault; women just would not knuckle down and get engineering degrees.

Moreover, Mr Damore’s outburst backfired, drawing attention not to his grievance but to his employer’s grievous lack of diversity. The company’s leadership is 75 per cent male. A mere 20 per cent of its engineering team — where most of the clout resides — are female. In an ongoing lawsuit, the Department of Labor claimed that “compensation disparities” are systemic across its workforce.

This year, Uber — one of the most highly valued private companies in Silicon Valley — lost 20 of its employees, a board member, and its chief executive officer after numerous scandals involving bullying, sexual harassment and even interference in investigation of a rape by a driver in India. In the computer games industry, the Gamergate campaign publicly targeted women with harassment, bullying and threats of rape.

The recent leak of a Google engineer’s screed against the company’s diversity initiatives is a reminder that the notion of Silicon Valley as the seat of human progress is a myth — at least when it comes to the way the women behind the latest in technology are treated.The tech industry is stuck in the past, more closely resembling “Mad Men”-era Madison Avenue or 1980s Wall Street than a modern egalitarian society. It may take the force of our legal system to change that.

While the document may be unusual in its explicit embrace of this kind of backward thinking, the attitudes that underlie it are nothing new in Silicon Valley.

Sadly, these types of cases represent only one element of the industrywide discrimination against women in tech. There’s also an alarming gap in pay and promotions, which has devastating effects on women’s careers.