
Giving Compass' Take:
- Lolita Taub, co-founder and General Partner at The Community Fund, details the underrepresentation of female founders in tech and the venture capital sector in general.
- How can donors help drive progress in advocating for females in the venture capital space? What are women's biggest hurdles to gain access to leadership pipelines?
- Read more on why we need to encourage women in tech.
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There has never been a better time to invest in underrepresented founders. Women and BAME founders especially. Because let's be honest, the tech industry is still very much male, pale (I would dare to say stale, too). And although it seems obvious to start investing more in diverse founders and fund owners for that matter, we're nowhere near equality in this space.
Venture funding for female founders in the U.S. has hit its lowest quarterly total in three years - firms invested a total of $434 million in Q3 2020, according to PitchBook data. Some might say that this is mainly due to the pandemic and less investment going to tech startups in general, but that's not true. The same report states how overall U.S. venture capital investments in 2020 are on par with previous years.
When it comes to representation of women in the venture capital sector, only 5.6% of all U.S. based VC firms are women-led, as revealed in the latest Women In VC report. And although 38% of all women-owned firms are founded by a woman of color, this represents only 2.1% of all VC firms in the U.S. Not really a statistic to boast with, isn't it?
"From a data perspective, there appears to be a slight improvement from an ethnic representation and women investment partner perspective. But can you really count such a small percentage as progress? I don’t think so. Single-digit representation is not real progress. To me, it smells like tokenism," Lolita Taub, co-founder and General Partner at The Community Fund, shares with me in an email.
Taub, who is a very vocal advocate for the rights of underrepresented investors and founders in the tech space, had very modest beginnings in the venture capital space.
Read the full article about underrepresentation in the tech investor space by Marija Butkovic at Forbes.