Survey of 869 founders: 78% of women and 48% of men have faced sexual harassment at work or know someone who faced it; 70% of women say it's underreported
they have every year.) http://stateofstartups.firstround.com/ ... pic.twitter.com/583Rnlq86s
Context & Ripple Effects
This First Round State of Startups finding lands six months after female entrepreneurs began describing investor harassment on the record, an episode that ended with Dave McClure no longer running 500 Startups following an internal investigation. What had been a scandal narrative now has baseline numbers: across 869 founders, 78% of women and 48% of men report experiencing or knowing someone who experienced workplace sexual harassment, and 70% of women call it underreported.
It also extends an older measurement thread — a 2015 survey of women tech entrepreneurs already flagged perceived bias — but this is the first in this coverage to size the problem across both genders in the general founder population.
First-order effects
- Founders reading the survey get a shared vocabulary for a problem previously discussed case-by-case, and investors like First Round are now publicly associated with quantifying it rather than treating it as anecdote.
- The 70% underreported figure directly challenges firms' existing complaint channels: whatever reporting mechanisms exist at funds and startups are demonstrably not being used.
Second-order effects
- Accelerators face pressure to audit their own portfolios — a step Y Combinator took within a year, when its internal survey found 19 of 88 female founders had inappropriate incidents with investors.
- Funds that don't measure become measurable against peers who do, turning harassment data into a diligence and reputation question for limited partners choosing where to commit capital.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, harassment surveys become a recurring benchmark rather than a one-off response to scandal — as confirmed when Women Who Tech later found 44% of women founders reporting harassment — pushing VC firms toward formal governance and reporting structures they historically lacked.
The trend: Sexual harassment in venture-backed startups is shifting from isolated scandals to annually quantified benchmarks that investors and accelerators are increasingly expected to measure and act on.