SAN
FRANCISCO — Silicon Valley has taken a beating in recent months over
being an old boy’s club, never more so than during the gender
discrimination trial filed against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
by one of its former partners.
Venture
capital firms — the investors whose millions of dollars help fund the
likes of Facebook and Uber — acknowledge that they are working on
changing that image. But a new study shows just how much work they have
to do.
Nearly
two-thirds of the top 71 investment funds have no women as senior
investment team members, according to the data compiled by the Social
and Capital Partnership and the Information, a news site. Roughly 30
percent of those funds have a senior investment team that is composed
entirely of white members.
The data highlights the large gap between Silicon Valley’s diversity ambitions and reality.
The
age of the investing partners is also on the higher side, with the
average age of the biggest venture firms solidly in the mid-40s.
Among
individual firms, Kleiner Perkins ranks highly in the study; three of
its 10 senior investment professionals are women and three are Asian.
Their average age is close to 48.
Accel,
the firm that backed a nascent Facebook, has three Asian members on its
eight-member senior investing team, though no women, and an average age
shy of 40.
(A
former female partner at Accel, Theresia Gouw, left last year to form
Aspect Ventures with another female venture capitalist, Jennifer
Fonstad.)
And the senior investing partners of Social Capital itself are half women and half Asian, with an average age of 38.5 years old.
On
the other end of the spectrum are some other well-known names. Sequoia
Capital has no women on its 14-member senior team, just two Asians and
an average age of 46. Founders Fund, which was co-founded by the
billionaire Peter Thiel, has no women or minorities on its senior team,
whose average age is about 38. And Andreessen Horowitz has one woman on
its 16-person senior team, one Asian and an average age of 50.
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