The venture-capital profession is less than a century old, but it controls a lot of investment capital—peaking at a record $63.3 billion in 2015, though that number is predicted to shrink this year due to a volatile stock market and fears of a tech bubble.
It is widely known that women aren’t well represented in founding or partner roles in the startup investment space: According to Tech Crunch, only 7 percent of investing partners at the top 100 venture firms are women. Most of the funds that come from these VC firms go to companies founded by men, and when women do get funded, they get less: A Bloomberg examination of 890 startups that received at least $20 million in VC funding found that women founders got an average of $77 million, compared to $100 for male founders.
