In recent years, many have pushed to level the playing field for women in tech through new initiatives, funds, companies, support networks and more. White women, however, have emerged as the key beneficiaries.
Less has been done to bolster black and Latinx female founders specifically. Enter digitalundivided. The organization, which encourages black and Latinx women to pursue entrepreneurship, has been working to highlight just how extensive the disparity in funding is for black and Latinx female founders.
Today the company published its first-ever report on venture capital funding, or lack thereof, for Latinx female founders via its proprietary research arm, called ProjectDiane, in partnership with JPMorgan Chase.
The key takeaways: Latinx women make up 17.1 percent of the U.S. women’s population but less than 2 percent of women-led startups have Latinx women founders. Of the 107 Latinx women-led startups in digitalundivided’s database, 58 of them have raised more than $1 million in funding. Overall, Latinx women have raised only .4 percent of the more than $400 billion VC dollars invested in startups since 2009.
“We are proud to be continuing the push toward a world where all women own their work through entrepreneurship, because that’s the path to real power and economic stability for black and Latinx communities,” said Kathryn Finney, digitalundivided’s chief executive officer, in a statement. “digitalundivided understands the impact of data on policy and startup ecosystems which is why we’re committed to using ProjectDiane to further develop data-driven programs for black and Latinx women founders and shape the narrative about women of color in startups.”
The company has released several reports on VC funding for black women founders. Their latest showed a slight increase in the number of black women to raise significant funding rounds. Still, black women have raised just .0006 percent of all VC since 2009.
In 2017, U.S. female-founded companies raised 2.2 percent of all VC, an abysmal and highly cited statistic. That number looks to be increasing ever-so-slightly in 2018, but the industry has a long way to go before capital is equally distributed.
Source: TechCrunch
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