Just 5.6% of senior partners and 10% of investment professionals at 191 US VC firms are women
Context & Ripple Effects
Dan Primack's count across 191 US VC firms becomes the baseline for what turns into an annual industry audit: a year later the same methodology finds 5.7% of decision-makers at 282 firms are women, and the 2017 update shows movement only to 7%. A companion study of 71 top firms that fall found the pipeline even thinner at the very top — 92% male on senior investment teams — so the senior-partner figure of 5.6% is not an artifact of small-firm noise.
The number matters because partner seats allocate capital: the same coverage cycle shows [[a:868513|only 10% of global venture funding in 2010-15 went to startups with at least one woman founder]], linking who holds the title to whose deals get funded.
First-order effects
- The 191 surveyed firms now have a published, comparable benchmark — any firm with zero female senior partners (the large majority, per later counting) is identifiable against a 5.6% industry floor.
Second-order effects
- Limited partners and founders gain a recurring dataset to press firms on; within three years advocacy groups are tracking hires directly, with All Raise counting 14 women added to senior roles in Q2 2018 while noting about 75% of firms still have no female partners.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, change arrives through outcomes rather than partner rosters — by 2024 PitchBook finds 14% of US unicorns have a female cofounder, up from 5% a decade earlier — even as the decision-maker share inches from 5.6% toward single digits, keeping the gap between who funds and who founds as the structural fault line.
The trend: US venture capital's gender composition has become an annually tracked public metric, and the slow drift of the numbers is itself the story firms are measured against.