Giving Compass' Take:
- The Allyship is an initiative to increase the number of women in the venture capital industry by 30 percent and combat the representation gap.
- The goal to increase gender representation within venture capital is not new. How can funding research about gender demographics help understand the scope of the problem?
- Read more about gender gaps in venture capital.
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The social impact project is building awareness through its research and podcast to get at least 30 percent of women to make up space in the venture capital industry by 2035.
There’s a problem in the investment community: In 2019, only 15.2 percent of partners at venture capital firms in Canada were women, and even lower in the United States at just 13.2 percent.
With venture capital being the primary funding source for most technology companies, some speculate that this stream deeply affects the types of projects being created. Unlike many industries that experienced losses during the pandemic, venture investment thrived and hit record highs in 2021.
Despite this, the first eight months of 2021 saw companies with solely female founders raising only 2.2 percent of that funding—a lower share than any of the previous five years.
Saskatchewan entrepreneur Katrina German has launched EthicalDigital.ca with the lofty goal of changing the trajectory of the internet. German’s team has expanded their marketing services to include major research projects, one of which named The Allyship, which is an initiative aiming to adjust the number of women in venture capital to at least 30 percent.
She says The Allyship is an initiative partnership with Silicon Valley venture capitalist Neal Dempsey, working to combat the underrepresentation of women in the venture capital industry through research and large-scale communications “to accelerate the current pace of social change.”
Read the full article about The Allyship by Noah Callaghan at Industry West.