Closing the gender gap in venture capital deserves immediate attention - Recode - 2 views
-
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.”
- ...7 more annotations...