Understanding Gender Bias In Venture Funding

USV portfolio company goTenna‘s founder and CEO Daniela Perdomo and USV analyst Dani Grant did some number crunching on VC funding and published the info last week.

After 4 rounds of VC, I ran my own data analysis to see if my experience is unique. Women founders in female-focused sectors raise equitable VC, but women in non-female sectors raise 54% less than their fair share. In deep-tech, women raise up to 75% less! https://t.co/4Fvfor3DXD

— Daniela Perdomo (@danielaperdomo) June 18, 2019

The good news is that in business sectors where women are well represented in the customer set, women founders are raising more (on a pro-rata basis) than their male counterparts.

The bad news is in the rest of the business sectors, women founders raise a lot less (on a pro-rata basis) and in “deep tech” the numbers are particularly bad.

These conclusions ring true to me based on what I see in the market.

I believe women founders have made a lot of progress in the last decade in raising VC. There are many more of them approaching VC firms for capital and many more of them getting funded. But it seems most of the progress has been in sectors where women are well represented.

The progress in sectors where women are not as well represented is almost non-existent. We in the VC sector need to understand the conscious and unconscious biases at work when we meet with a women founder working in one of these under-represented sectors and fight them off.

Founders like Daniela, when they are successful, will help a lot. There is nothing like success to change people’s opinions, conscious and otherwise.