The dominoes are falling in Silicon Valley: technology companies releasing their diversity data, apologizing for the sins of the past, and promising to do better. I know from my meetings with executives of Google and Facebook that they are dead serious; that this isn’t just a marketing campaign. They are looking into the sources of the conscious and subconscious bias that has led to the exclusion of women, blacks, and Latinos from their workforce. And they are instituting policies and education programs to correct it. They have understood the benefits of being inclusive.
In truth, VC firms do have a lot to hide. The Babson research revealed that only 2.7 percent of the 6,517 companies that received venture funding from 2011 to 2013 had female chief executives. Minority-led firms surely fare even more poorly. If VCs did disclose their partner and investment-diversity data, their investors — which include pension funds, universities, and state governments — would likely protest or walk away.
Sexism, racism, and ageism also have a code name that VCs use with pride: “pattern recognition.” Venture capitalists claim to know a successful entrepreneur, engineer, or business executive when they see one. As I detailed in my book Innovating Women, one famous investor said at a major technology conference: “If you look at [Amazon founder Jeff] Bezos, or [Netscape Communications Corp. founder Marc] Andreessen, [Yahoo Inc. co-founder] David Filo, the founders of Google, they all seem to be white, male nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life. So when I see that pattern coming in — which was true of Google — it was very easy to decide to invest.”
It is time to hold the venture-capital community accountable and to demand that it publish diversity data. At a discussion hosted by Politico in San Francisco, Janet Napolitano, former Department of Homeland Security secretary, who is now president of the University of California, promised me that she would have her investment team look into the university’s venture investments and find ways of adding the necessary pressure. We need to have other funds do the same. This will benefit the innovation ecosystem and the economy by causing more dominos to fall.
The glaring gender dilemma Silicon Valley venture capitalists are hiding from
via The glaring gender dilemma Silicon Valley venture capitalists are hiding from – The Washington Post.
