Are Venture Capital Firms gender biased?
October 15, 2009
While I was reading through various Venture Capital Investments related articles, I came across an interesting publication called “The Venture capital gap – Are VC’s sexist?”. In this article the author provided interesting statistics which pointed that surprisingly only 5-10% of the venture capital industry is made up of women. Furthermore, only 25% of all venture capital partnerships have a single women partner, and only 7% to 8% have more than one women partner. Later in the article, the author quotes a study by the Kauffman Institute, which points out the reason Venture Capital and Private Equity industries are dominated by male professionals, is the lack of female role models, which on it term creates a self-perpetuating cycle. Another reason that limits the presence of women in the venture capital industry is the fact that the academic backgrounds that are preferred by venture capital firms tend to be concentrated in the technology areas, such as computer science, engineering and biotechnology, and there males are the majority.