Gender, leadership and venture capital: measuring women’s leadership in VC firm portfolios
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a new index summarizing women’s leadership in entrepreneurial ventures (WLEV) in the context of venture capital (VC) firm portfolios. Gender representation among VC portfolio firms is a concern for academics, and increasingly for practitioners aiming to reap the benefits of gender diversity. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on the institutional theory and gender role congruity theory, the authors present dimensions of women’s involvement in leadership roles in VC-funded companies. As previous research has not provided standard definitions, the authors clarify the relevant dimensions. In addition, the authors present an empirical analysis of 153 VC fund portfolios and demonstrate women’s involvement across the three key dimensions forming the WLEV Index: involvement in leadership, management and founding of portfolio companies. Findings The authors present a summary of WLEV index aligned with previous research. The index has suitable characteristics for future research and introduces a first comparison with existing statistics. The authors’ findings show relatively low scores of women’s leadership in the VC portfolio companies investigated, especially as compared to average USA companies. Originality/value This paper introduces standardized definitions for women’s leadership in terms of: women-led, women-founded and women-managed. This paper also introduces a methodology and constructs an index to uniformly compare VC firm portfolio companies according to all three dimensions of women’s leadership. These contributions can be expected to form the basis of future research on gender representation in VC portfolio companies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".