Why Only 2% of VC Goes to Women!

About this episode

Laurie McGraw discusses the challenges female founders face in securing venture capital with three influential women in the investment space.

Less than 2% of venture capital goes to female founders. When Laurie McGraw started Inspiring Women five years ago, the number was 2.4%. A few years later it had dropped to 1.8%. Absolute dollars going to women have grown, but the share of total capital has gone the other way, and the gap is now one of the largest unsolved problems in capital allocation. Laurie sits down with three women working to change that from inside the system. The guests: Ita Ekpoudom is a Partner at Gingerbread Capital, a family office fund started by a former co-chair of tech banking at Goldman Sachs who realized after retiring that she had never made a private investment in her entire career. Gingerbread now invests directly into female-founded and co-founded companies, and as an LP into majority women-led funds. Jenny Abramson is the Founder and Managing Partner of Rethink Impact, the largest fund in the country backing female CEOs across health, education, environment, and economic empowerment. Jenny was a tech CEO herself before founding Rethink in 2015. Her mother had run one of the earliest institutional funds backing women roughly twenty years before that, and the share of VC going to women was…

People in this episode

Host: Laurie McGraw

Guests: Ita Ekpoudom, Jenny Abramson, Erin Harkless Moore

Topics covered

• venture capital
• female founders
• investment
• gender equity
• capital allocation

Keywords

• venture capital
• female founders
• investment funds
• gender disparity
• capital allocation

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Gingerbread Capital, Rethink Impact, Pivotal Ventures

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