Fintech Feminists

CHAPTER THREEDEFYING THE ODDS

Almost all the trailblazing women featured in this book – and within our fintech ecosystem – share a critical commonality: They’ve successfully secured venture capitalist (VC) funding. Venture capital is the key ingredient to transform audacious technology-based ideas into world-changing institutions that reshape our financial landscape and influence the fabric of our society. Start-ups funded by VC may form the future transformative companies that become drivers of economic growth. For example, many well-known publicly traded technology companies, including Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Amazon, were once VC funding recipients. Paradoxically, these investments are a part of the origin of the cycle of wealth disparities (notice the companies above are all founded by men). Year over year, I have to report on the same statistic: Of the billions of dollars invested in start-ups across business sectors, only a minuscule 2% of those funds go to women-owned companies.¹

To be fair, while just 2% of VC capital goes to firms founded solely by women, closer to 20% of VC capital goes to firms with at least one woman as a co-founder. While that is promising progress and those female co-founders deserve to be celebrated, the data suggests VCs need to write checks to far more than just 50% of their portfolio with a female founder as a form of fairness in gender parity. If we benchmark equity in terms of gender parity among mixed-gender founding teams, then 70% of ...