Study: Most top venture executives male
Fewer than 10% of senior posts held by women
It is perhaps the last boys' club in finance. Everyone knows it to be true, but for the first time a new study quantifies the maleness of the hottest industry of the 1990s: In venture capital, fewer than 10 percent of senior executives are women.
Not only are female partners rare at these elite investment firms, but women who started in entry-level positions in the industry left at twice the rate of their male peers from 1995 to 2000, according to the study, which was funded by the Kauffman Foundation and is slated for release today at a Small Business Administration entrepreneurship conference in Washington, D.C.
"Frankly, shame on us," said David B. Fialkow, a founder of General Catalyst Partners in Cambridge. "That means the best and the brightest are not in our business. And if we're not attracting great women leaders as VCs, we're probably not attracting all the best entrepreneurs."
Patricia G. Greene, dean of the undergraduate school at Babson College in Wellesley and an author of the study, said venture firms, like many businesses, have hired mostly men out of habit and tradition.
"I don't think it's an intentional thing as much as unconscious," Greene said. "They work with the people in their network. They work with whom they know."
Greene frets that the dearth of female investors may be part of why female entrepreneurs have less chance of being funded than men who start new companies. Taken to its extreme, she said, it means women aren't participating significantly in decisions about the future of technology.
"You have to look at who's driving the technology trends," said Greene, an expert on entrepreneurship who worked on the study as part of the broader Diana Project, which is researching women's business opportunities nationally. "What do we want it to look like, and where should our economy's money be going?"
Thomas Crotty, a general partner at Battery Ventures in Wellesley, said he's never felt a bias against women at his firm. Battery has hired several women at the analyst level, he said, and has interviewed women for partner posts, but, "We just never got to the finish line."
"It's probably evolving more slowly than it should," Crotty said. He suggested that progress tends to be slower at private partnerships, where the openings are few and coveted, than at large corporations, where there are greater outside pressures to have a diverse staff.
A handful of women have defied the odds and become partners at Boston-area venture firms, including Jean George of Advanced Technology Ventures, Marcia Hooper of Castile Ventures, and Sheryl Marshall, a longtime stockbroker who started her own firm, Axxon Capital. There seem to be more women in venture capital on the West Coast, perhaps because there are more technology companies there. Greylock Partners, the venerable Boston firm, last year named as principal -- a notch below partner -- Michele Law, a former hardware engineer at Sun Microsystems Inc. who also has designed chips at IBM and done a stint in investment banking. Law works in the firm's San Mateo, Calif., office.
Fialkow, of General Catalyst, pointed out that many of the customers who entrust millions of dollars from endowments and foundations to venture firms, to invest in deals, are women. When it comes to hiring women, as an industry, he said, "We could do a better job at this."
Beth Healy can be reached at bhealy@globe.com.
