Survey: 44% of women founders and 65% of LGBTQ founders say they've been harassed, ~50% of women founders were told they would raise more money if they were men
Context & Ripple Effects
The new Women Who Tech survey extends a documented arc rather than opening one: an earlier [[a:924681|survey of 869 founders found 78% of women had faced or knew someone facing sexual harassment]], and Y Combinator's own internal review found inappropriate incidents with investors among its female founders. What this survey adds is the LGBTQ figure — 65%, the highest reported group here — and a direct quote-level claim about fundraising bias.
That fundraising claim lands against hard money data: [[a:926314|PitchBook counted all-female founding teams at roughly 2.2% of the $85B VCs invested in 2017]], while behavioral research on [[a:920311|TechCrunch Disrupt pitch videos showed VCs probing for potential gains with men and losses with women]]. The survey connects the attitudinal evidence to the allocation gap.
First-order effects
- Women Who Tech now has a headline statistic — half of women founders told they'd raise more money as men — that advocacy groups and LPs can cite directly when pressing venture firms on conduct and diligence practices.
- LGBTQ founders emerge as the most-affected cohort in the dataset at 65% reporting harassment, a group largely absent from the prior founder surveys.
Second-order effects
- Accelerators like Y Combinator, which already ran its own internal survey after incidents surfaced, face pressure to formalize investor-conduct policies rather than handle cases ad hoc.
- VCs pitching diverse LPs must reconcile the 2.2% funding share for all-female teams with survey evidence that the shortfall tracks interviewer behavior, not just pipeline.
Third-order effects
- If each successive survey shows the same pattern persisting from 2015 through 2020, the likely structural outcome is investor conduct becoming a formal diligence item — codes of conduct, reporting channels, and LP scrutiny — rather than a reputational issue handled case by case.
- Persistent documentation of both harassment and framing bias in pitches points toward capital allocation itself being re-examined, since the same interview dynamics that suppress funding for women founders are measurable in public pitch footage.
The trend: Founder surveys are accumulating into a longitudinal record that shifts gender and LGBTQ bias in venture funding from anecdote to a measurable, auditable problem for LPs and accelerators.