Previously we reported on the steady increase in the number of women foundersand the universities that produce them. In this study, we looked at two new questions.
First, we set out to determine how many women are true investing partners at the leading venture and micro-venture firms. While everyone knows that the number of female investing partners is very limited, we aimed to establish a well-defined baseline against which to measure future progress.
Second, we wanted to explore which venture firms have the strongest track record of supporting startups with at least one female co-founder. In particular, we wanted to see if firms with female partners were any more likely than average to invest in female entrepreneurs. This is a less-well-explored area but one that CrunchBase is well-suited to address because of its efforts last year to sharpen its data on women co-founders and this year to do the same with data on female venture capitalists.
To answer the first question, we looked at the top 100 venture firms globally, based on longevity (active since 2010), recent activity (investing in 2014 and 2015), rounds led and fund size. We looked at all the women listed as “partners” at those firms, and screened that list to ensure they were true “full time investing partners,” which, in our definition, means the authority to invest the partnership’s funds.
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