Report: only 15% of GPs at European VC firms are women, managing just 9% of total assets; in the UK, 13% of GPs are women, managing 5% of total assets
Across Europe as a whole, 85% of VC GPs are men. — In worse than the average in the UK, where 87% of GPs are men.
Context & Ripple Effects
This report extends a decade of measurement that has mostly documented stasis. A 2019 study found 63% of UK VC firms had no senior women in their investment teams, with women holding 13% of senior roles — unchanged from 2017. The new numbers add a dimension earlier counts lacked: not just who sits at the table, but who controls the capital, with women GPs managing 9% of European assets and just 5% in the UK.
The asset-share figure is the sharper finding because it shows representation thinning as money gets closer to deployment. Earlier US snapshots told the same story one tier down: [[a:917851|women were 7% of decision-makers at 227 US VC firms and controlled 4.7% of venture dollars raised]] over five years, after 5.6% of senior partners at 191 US firms in 2015. The UK's 13%-of-GPs-but-5%-of-assets split mirrors that pattern exactly.
First-order effects
- UK firms sit below the already-low European average on both measures — 13% of GPs versus 15%, and 5% of assets versus 9% — putting UK allocators under the most pointed scrutiny in this dataset.
- LPs now have an auditable capital-control metric, not just a headcount one, making it harder for firms to present token senior hires as progress.
Second-order effects
- Funds competing for institutional commitments face pressure to show GP-level diversity or risk losing allocations to peers that can, since the asset-share gap gives LPs a concrete benchmark to allocate against.
- Founders raising from European VC confront a gatekeeping layer that is 85-87% male, which shapes whose networks warm introductions run through.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the composition of GP partnerships determines the composition of funded founding teams downstream — consistent with PitchBook's finding that only 14% of US unicorns have a female cofounder and 5% a female founding CEO, up from near-zero a decade ago but still far from parity.
- A decade of reports measuring the same gap with barely moved numbers points toward structural remedies — mandate-driven LP allocation and disclosure requirements — rather than voluntary hiring pipelines, though whether regulators act on European fund structures is genuinely unresolved.
The trend: Venture capital's gender gap has proven resistant to a decade of measurement, with women's share of managed capital falling further behind their share of GP seats — pushing the debate from headcounts toward who controls allocation.