Is something holding us back from raising our hands?

As I go deeper into the tech/venture arena, I often find myself as the lone women in rooms full of men.

(Insert binders of women joke here.)

To my core, I am what many would consider a girls’ girl. I — not so jokingly — joke that if I could move back to the sorority house, I would.

Knowing that you can imagine that as I deepen my startup/venture network, I am disappointed that there are not more female peers.

It makes me wonder why. Why aren’t more venture-backed (or backable) founders women? Why aren’t more investors women? Are we being shut out? Or, is the better question, are we not opting in?

I want to better understand what is holding women back from getting into the startup game.

By no stretch of the imagination do I have any of the answers to these tangled and tricky questions. Rather, I have my current hypotheses (which will undoubtedly be overturned) based on a small sample size of entrepreneurs we have worked alongside at The Startup Collaborative.

Since launching last year, The Startup Collaborative has supported just shy of 200 aspiring entrepreneurs as they pursue product-market fit and eventually scale. It’s a small dataset, for sure, but even still some trends have started to emerge.

Of those, nearly 23 percent have a female founder or cofounder from day one. The majority of that percentage being female-only founding teams. The remaining subset being cofounders that are mixed gender. And, for anecdotal novelty sake, nearly all the mixed gender teams are married.

We are at the tip-top of the startup funnel. Taking inspiration and turning it into a company.

What is happening that is keeping fewer women from starting up? Let’s table the conversation about challenges once they start to scale, especially if they’re considering venture.

I am just curious…

I’ll continue this stream of consciousness in future posts and go deeper on some of the trends in our portfolio.

For now, some reading on the topic:

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