BAD PRESS
The paucity of senior women VCs exists at a time when difficulties facing women in technology have hit the headlines.
Examples include statistics showing low numbers of women at companies such as Facebook and Google; a lawsuit by a female founder of dating app Tinder alleging she was pushed aside; and three suits brought by female employees at venture firms alleging harassment or discrimination, or sometimes both.
Despite the lawsuits, female venture capitalists say, the troubles in venture generally lean to the subtle, such as leaving women out of key meetings or social gatherings. [eap_ad_2] Even if they lack women in investment roles, which carry the most prestige, many firms have senior partners in operational roles such as marketing and finance, and many back female-founded companies.
“I am quite optimistic about women in venture,” said Benchmark’s Gurley, who while he has no female investing colleagues himself named Ruby Lu at DCM, Jenny Lee at GGV, and Rebecca Lynn at Canvas as “fantastic” investors.
Other accomplished female investors include Mary Meeker and Beth Seidenberg of Kleiner Perkins; and Theresia Gouw, formerly of Accel Partners and now head of her own firm, Aspect Ventures.
FITTING IN
Many venture capitalists, both women and men, say that a big part of the problem lies in the educational and career paths many women have opted to pursue at a time when many firms seek VCs with technical backgrounds.
The percentages of women majoring in engineering, computer science and math have declined over the last decade, to 19 percent, 18 percent, and 43 percent of all students majoring in each of those fields respectively, according to the National Science Foundation.
The percentage of female entrepreneurs has stagnated since the early 1980s at around 27 percent, says Ross Levine, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
“You have to say, ‘Where are the women in computer science?’” said Ann Winblad, a founding partner at Hummer Winblad, who added that her firm hires partners largely from the group of company founders it has backed.
Top firms especially tend to lack senior women, leading to comparisons with “Mad Men,” the TV show about 1960s-era advertising where men dominate. Benchmark and Sequoia, for example, employ no women in any investing capacity in the United States.
Most firms do the bulk of their investing in the United States, but some of them say their numbers would be better if overseas offices were included. Sequoia employs female managing directors in China, for example.
Another issue is that top firms enjoy spectacular investing results, leading to little pressure from their own investors -known as limited partners – to change things, the LPs say.
“At the end of the day, it does come down to returns, and their network,” said Atul Rustgi, a principal at Accolade Partners, a limited partner whose portfolio includes leading venture firms such as Accel and Andreessen Horowitz. Accolade raises the gender issue with its portfolio firms, but “how much pressure you can exert is a whole different matter,” he said.
Judy O’Brien, a five-time Midas List venture capitalist who is now a partner at law firm King & Spalding, says, learning the ropes without a female mentor can be tough. “You don’t quite know how to conduct yourself in a senior position,” for example, establishing stature in a meeting.
Many women say they did not initially aspire to become a venture capitalist and needed someone to nudge them into the business.
Aileen Lee, a onetime engineering major who stepped back from Kleiner Perkins two years ago to start her own firm, Cowboy Ventures, spoke in April about her career in a speech at Upward, a women’s organization founded by Lisa Lambert of Intel Capital.
It took Kleiner Perkins reaching out to her while she was an executive at Gap, the retailer, before she even considered the industry. The men she had known at Harvard Business School who aspired to venture capital seemed worlds away. Drawing laughs, she pegged them as preppie squash players and overly ambitious briefcase toters.
“I just figured I’d never fit in,” she said at Upward. “I don’t still.” (Reuters)[eap_ad_3]