As a female investor, startup founder, startup mentor and mum to 4 females, I’m high-fiving Skip Capital‘s Kim Jackson‘s call out for more VC funding for femalefounders. See article here.
Female-led startups currently receive just 2% (!) of global startup venturecapital funding, 90% of venture capitalists are male, and the startups that successfully raise still tend to be overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly white and buoyed by masculine hubris.
“Biases absolutely play a part” in funding disparity, says Laura Huang, a management professor at Wharton. “In the context of entrepreneurship, there is so little objective data to go on in the early stages of a venture [that it] makes it easier [for VCs] to be influenced, whether implicitly or explicitly, and make judgments based on personal attributes like gender.”
The fact is that investable startups should have little to do with gender, and everything to do with great ideas, great teams and great execution.
The data – and gender deficit – are clear.
What we now need are actions for how we grow the female VC pool, address VC bias in early stage deal flow dynamics, and give female founders more access to intellectual, social and financial capital in the innovation ecosystem here in Australia.