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If indeed the most successful ventures are run on average by founders in their 40s, why is it that VCs seem to focus so intently on younger founders who seem to be wildly statistically unsuccessful?

VCs believe they have “pattern recognition” abilities that they simply don’t have. Instead, they rely on suppositions and stereotypes that don’t match the underlying data on startup success. The same reason why older founders are ignored by the ecosystem is the same reason why women and other minorities struggle in the Valley: It’s really not about what you build, but what you look like while building it.

Only 11 startups led by Black women have raised more than $1 million in outside funding—and are typically funded by the same three investors. One of them, the angel investor Joanne Wilson, says it's true that she's made it a point to use her investments to back more women in the tech community. But she rejects the idea that this has anything to do with lowering her standards when scrutinizing a product. “I invest in people,” Wilson says. “But I think everyone invests in people, no matter what industry you’re in.”

Ms. Melendez recalls one meeting about three years ago where she and other members of the digital-marketing team talked about spotting edgy fashion photos where models were using highlighter—a type of makeup that accentuates facial contours. In a matter of days, the team was working on a separate landing page for Sephora’s site to showcase the product. “It’s easier to forecast what’s coming and what’s going to be needed because the line is so fine between you as an employee and you as a client,” says Ms. Melendez, now digital-marketing director at Aquis Inc., a San Francisco-based beauty company.

Terre Layton, an engineer by training, had worked in Silicon Valley for nearly two decades, for small startups and large companies such as HP Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc., before she joined Sephora in 2011. Recruited as a product manager to lead the retailer’s website redesign, Ms. Layton says she found being in the presence of so many women leaders empowering after years spent in male-dominated workplaces. When it came time to brainstorm ideas, or even articulate concerns about a project’s direction, bosses made a point of asking team members for their opinions, she says. “You knew you were being heard. You had a voice,” says Ms. Layton, who last worked for Sephora in 2015 and now advises early stage startups on product management and user experience.

Ms. Linnenbach, who served as Sephora’s interim vice president of talent for six months in 2014, says the company makes a point of moving high-performing women into digital and tech roles that round out their skills and experience. “They have that longer-range view of what would be better for the organization in terms of talent development,” Ms. Linnenbach says. “They are willing to put a person in a position where [the company is] willing to lose ground so this person gets exposure on the international side or experience with a P&L,” she says. A similar philosophy applies to staffing technology teams, where company recruiters encourage women to consider roles that might not fit precisely with their skills and experience.

“Even if a female candidate doesn’t have all the requirements for a technical job, we want that person to come in and show what they can do,” says Yvette Nichols, the company’s vice president of talent. Sephora’s approach represents a departure from the way many large technology companies, especially those in Silicon Valley, handle recruitment, says Jane Hamner, a veteran recruiter with Harvey Nash Group PLC, whose clients include Amazon.com Inc., Expedia Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc. “Most companies that we work with are looking at skills over all else,” she says. “They can be very picky about skill sets and go only for the top of the talent pool.”

The study’s authors found that investors tended to ask men questions about the potential for gains and women about the potential for losses. Both men and women expressed the bias against women founders.

investors adopted what’s called a promotion orientation when quizzing male entrepreneurs, which means they focused on hopes, achievements, advancement, and ideals. Conversely, when questioning female entrepreneurs they embraced a prevention orientation, which is concerned with safety, responsibility, security, and vigilance. We found that 67% of the questions posed to male entrepreneurs were promotion-oriented, while 66% of those posed to female entrepreneurs were prevention-oriented.

Every prevention question posed to an entrepreneur meant $3.8 million less in funding for their companies FOR EACH QUESTION. According to the study, entrepreneurs who fielded mostly prevention questions raised $2.3 million in aggregate funds for their startups through 2017. That’s seven times less than the $16.8 million raised by entrepreneurs who were asked promotion questions.

The research that formed the core of the study consisted of the authors observing initial due diligence between 140 investors (40 percent of whom were women) and 189 entrepreneurs at TechCrunch Disrupt New York.

male-led startups raised five times more funding than companies led by women. The study and its findings go a long way to explain the enormous gender gap in venture capital funding in the U.S.

Women startup founders raise roughly 2% of all venture funding, even though they own 38% of the businesses in the country, the study’s authors write.

Women contribute to 25 percent of the GDP growth. Women are starting more companies. Women outperform men in both brokerage performance as well as hedge fund performance. Why not see how this plays out in venture capital?

A Geek Feminism wiki is keeping an annotated list of news reports on VCs accused of harassment and gender or racial bias.

The FairFunders group plans to gather facts for a profile of each investment firm, such as its ratio of female partners, and the number of women-led companies it has backed.

“It’s not about the skills, it’s about who’s doing the work. The work gets valued in different ways depending on who is doing it.” That’s why, Hicks pointed out, today software developers have a higher status and pay than people who do quality assurance and testing—jobs that require similar skills but “because of who usually does these jobs are valued differently in a way that is disproportionate to the content of the work.”

he fix for it doesn’t involve a better pipeline, she says, but changing things at the top. We have an opportunity to do that now, she says, because “tech is becoming more diffuse; the higher you go, the fewer tech skills you need.

We also need to encourage better measurement and data on diversity in the venture and startup ecosystem. Project Include has designed some helpful frameworks and recommendations — and funds like Reach Capital and First Round Capital are ably demonstrating what these efforts look like in action.

At the VC level, funds should commit to treating harassment and discrimination against female founders with the same legal protections as harassment and discrimination against employees. Commit to a clear code of conduct, share it openly with your team and portfolio,

If your company screens for “culture fit,” look closely at how that operates: Is it thoughtfully assessed based on company values, or has it become an excuse for people to prefer those “like them”? Anything involving “I would get a beer with this person” is a sign that unconscious bias is alive and well.

What often gets lost when you have a persistency in underclass representation — be it women, minorities, introverts, etc. — is that the persistency in and of itself becomes justification for the outcome. In other words, if 7 percent of the venture industry is women and has been for decades, it must be something inherent to women in tech, not conditions or other factors. Only by examining that narrative and challenging it with experimentation, initiatives and constantly evaluating results can we drive systemic change in our industry.

referring to “the pipeline problem” is really just a way of saying, “It’s not my problem.”

And, frankly, anyone who says this is also saying, “I'm okay with sexism. I'm okay with inequity.”

According to a 2016 survey produced by the National Venture Capital Association and Deloitte Consulting, women make up just 11 percent of partners at venture investment firms. And of the $60 billion in funding the industry disbursed in 2015, female founders received just 7 percent.