PitchBook: all-female founding teams received ~2.2% of $85B total invested by VCs in 2017, up from 1.9% in 2016, as all-male founding teams received ~79%
giving men a leg up when it comes to raising funds” - just 2% of 2017's VC funding went to women-led co's http://fortune.com/... Jodi Jahic / @jodij : Sobering statistics, but @kmlake is right: in a cash-constrained environment, founders must deeply consider how their business will be healthy and sustainable. Which is a good thing. @valzarya http://fortune.com/... Karen Appleton Page / @karenappleton : Guys—you make up 96% of VCs, can we talk? What are you leaving on the table here? Female founders got 2% of venture capital dollars in 2017 http://for.tn/2BdLfjU via @FortuneMagazine
Context & Ripple Effects
The 2017 PitchBook numbers land mid-arc: Karen Appleton Page's public challenge to a VC corps that is 96% male, and Jodi Jahic's counterpoint that constrained capital forces founders to prove sustainability, frame the debate that follows. A year later, PitchBook and All Raise put 2018's total for US female founders at $2.88B across 482 teams, with average deals for women-led companies at $5.9M versus $17.3M for men — the dollar-gap behind the percentage gap.
First-order effects
- With all-male founding teams taking ~79% of the $85B deployed in 2017, allocation power sits almost entirely with the male-dominated partnership Karen Appleton Page addresses directly, and female founders compete for a pool measured in single-digit percentages.
Second-order effects
- The disparity catalyzes organized responses rather than organic correction: All Rise-style tracking institutionalizes the data, and by 2024 the share of US VC firms with at least one female partner had doubled from its 2018 level to roughly 18%.
Third-order effects
- A decade of measurement shows the all-female-team share barely moves — Crunchbase found it stuck at 2.3% in 2021 — while gains instead accrue through mixed founding teams and rising female cofounder rates among unicorns, suggesting the structural fix runs through who sits on the investing side, not founder composition alone.
The trend: Venture capital's gender funding gap is proving sticky at the all-female-team level, with incremental progress arriving via mixed teams and more female partners rather than a shift in how all-female startups get funded.