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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.

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.

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.”

women aren’t facing these challenges alone, female entrepreneurs say—not if they tap into the dense ecosystem of engineers’ groups, startup founders’ organizations, meet-ups, conferences, mentoring relationships, and female-friendly investors that have evolved in parallel with established Silicon Valley institutions mostly staffed by men.

women’s groups—representing thousands of members—seem energized by the eruptions of public attention to gender discrimination and harassment that arose after former Uber engineer Susan Fowler and other women accused powerful men in the tech industry of pressuring them sexually, touching, or groping them.

Even if a male venture partner or company executive hasn’t been outed on the front page of a national newspaper, his behavior might already be the subject of scorching accounts by women on their group channels, possibly damaging his reputation among hundreds or thousands of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. This could come as a shock to some of those men if they haven’t been directly confronted about their conduct.

hedge funds owned or managed by women have an 8.95% return rate, handily beating the 2.69% return rate generated by an index of typical funds. Also, Google’s attrition rate decreased by 50% after it extended its paid maternity leave for women to five months

Five years ago, I started a conference with my co-founder, Nancy Hechinger, called the Womens Entrepreneur Festival at the ITP division of New York University. We celebrate and showcase women entrepreneurs. Women network differently. They run their companies differently and they think differently than men.

the average age of a startup founder is about 41.9 years of age among all startups that hire at least one employee, and among the top 0.1 percent of highest-growth startups, that average age moves up to 45 years old. Those ages are taken from the time of the founding of the company.

“The only category where the mean ages appear (modestly) below age 40 is when the firm has VC-backing. The youngest category is VC-backed firms in New York, where the mean founder age was 38.7.”

older entrepreneurs appear correlated with better startup performance. “For example, the 1,700 founders of the fastest growing new ventures (1 in 1,000) in our universe of U.S. firms had an average age of 45.0 (compared to 43.7 for the top 1% and 42.1 for the top 5%),”

Of the thousands of venture deals minted from 2012 to 2014, so few black women founders raised money that, statistically speaking, the number might as well be zero. (The exact number is 24 out of 10,238, or just 0.2 percent.) Of those few that have raised money, the average amount of funding its $36,000. That's compared to the typical startup, typically founded by a white male, that typically fails. These manage to raise an average of $1.3 million in venture funding.

This disparity comes even as black women today comprise the fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs in the US, with over 1.5 million businesses—a 322 percent increase since 1997. These businesses generate over $44 billion a year in revenue. Yet in the tech world, investors aren’t taking a risk on startups run by black women.

These stats comes from a new report, Project Diane, which calls black women founders "the real unicorns of tech."

Do you comprehend that it does not require “machine learning” to see that people will need sidewalk salt in the winter and lemonade in the summer? Do you get that one does not need “machine learning” to predict that people like pretzels?

Have you ever been in an actual bodega? Have you noticed that “mom-and-pop” store is often a literal description of these places and not just a line on your pitch deck to a bunch of “angel investors” who drive Teslas and haven’t called their actual moms or pops in months?

you’re “not particularly concerned” about the name Bodega, explaining that you “did surveys in the Latin American community to understand if they felt the name was a misappropriation of that term or had negative connotations, and 97% said ‘no.’” How many members of “the Latin American community” did you ask? What in your cultural education has led you to believe that in this country there is a monolithic “Latin American community”?