The other day, I dialed into a meeting of VCs for Repro, a coalition of investors that support access to abortion. I was stunned. The room was 90% female.
We all know the statistics about gender representation among venture capital investors—it’s unfortunately pretty hard to gather a roomful of female investors unless the meeting is specifically about being a female investor.
To me, abortion isn’t just a women’s issue, so I really didn’t expect this lack of representation from my male colleagues.
We had a conversation about why this might be the case—why more venture firms weren’t signing up.
There are 75 firms that have attached themselves to this list but lots of notable exceptions. It’s great to see a whale like Insight Partners up there, but there are only a couple of other more established names and they’re mostly smaller, like Eniac, Anthemis, and Bloomberg Beta.
A lot of the firms are either new or focused on female founders, like BBG and Female Founders Fund.
Someone had surmised that maybe big firms were worried about LP fallout—that if your LPs were Catholic Charities or the Notre Dame endowment, your investors might walk. That didn’t really make much sense to me, because I don’t really think that Benchmark, Sequoia, First Round Capital or Union Square Ventures are hurting for LPs—and once those guys sign on, then it becomes a list you kind of have to be on.
I would argue that this is a list VCs need to be (Read more…)