Illustration by Emilee Youn
This past March, the venture capital (VC) space demonstrated progress—at least that’s what was reported in the headlines of numerous articles. According to PitchBook’s All In report in 2026, $76.3 billion was backed by U.S. VCs in female-founded companies. That amount makes up more than a quarter of all allocated U.S. venture capital.
However, beyond the headlines, the story falls short. Two-thirds of capital distributed to female-founded startups by VCs within the past year was for companies focused on AI. Of that, approximately half of those investments were provided to two companies: Anthropic and Scale AI.
Outside of those two deals, female-founded companies only raised about 13% more than the previous year. Although that is still an improvement, it’s not as revolutionary as the headlines reflect. Overall, the number of deals given to female founders decreased again for the fourth year, which follows the trajectory of a downward slope since a peak in 2021.
The same report revealed that all-female founding teams raised a measly 1.1% of all U.S. venture capital dollars last year, which reflects a decrease from 2.1% in 2024. In dollars, all-female teams raised $3.2 billion through 794 deals, while all-male teams raised $191.1 billion through 10,048 deals.
There is a reason why female leaders are not the face of venture capital (VC).
Countless justifications encompassed the same rationale: the pipeline. According to these explanations, there simply aren’t enough qualified women to fulfill the duties of founders and investors.
It’s the easy way out to explain this injustice, because it puts the weight on women for simply being women rather than the flaws within the industry. It is also false.
Women still hold just 15 to 17% of decision-making roles such as being partners, principals, and managing directors who actually decide which checks get written. Almost three-quarters of the U.S. VC firms don’t have a single female investing partner at all.
Based on a May 2026 analysis from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics and the National Center for Education Statistics, women now earn 53% of all doctorates awarded to U.S. citizens and permanent residents, represent 58.1% of U.S. graduate students, and hold 59.8% of master’s degrees nationwide. If VCs were running their system purely on merit, the gap would not stretch this wide.
There isn’t a gap because female founders perform worse; they often perform 2.5 times better in returns compared to male-founded startups, according to a 2026 report by Theanna. Ultimately, these statistics represent trillions of dollars in global economic opportunities that are long down the drain.
Women are not invested in because of the gender barrier instilled in the VC space. The majority of the investors in female-founded start-ups are women in the first place, with barely any male leaders backing these startups. As the Founders Forum Group reported, VC firms with at least one female partner are 2.3 times more inclined to invest in female founders.
It is neither necessary nor clever to perceive venture capital as a villain. Rather, this niche industry requires accepting what the statistics already show: the gender gap is not due to a shortage of qualified, technical women. Instead, it is the result of an industry that hands out 2 to 3% of its capital to all-female founding teams. There is an abundance of women waiting at the gate to be funded as a result of the gender gap.
The question is not whether women are ready to engage in this field. The only question we should tinker with is whether this industry will finally open the gate for them, or just keep using misleading headlines to ease our minds.
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