Lady Business: Where women get VC funding; When writers ‘kind of forget’
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the sixty-ninth issue, published May 23, 2019.
Bridging the Money Gap
In the past few weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time at events talking about how people fund big projects -- and why there’s still such a huge financing disparity between white men and anyone else. Women got 2.2 percent of venture capital in 2018; black women get less than 1 percent. (Which are percentages that get replicated in many industries: In Hollywood, for example, women got to direct 4 percent of the 100 top grossing films last year.)
Which is why I want to recommend a couple of big projects we’ve been working on at Inc. First, if you’re a woman founder thinking about seeking outside investment, you need to check out this amazing searchable database of venture capital firms specifically investing in women entrepreneurs. Called The Fundery, it grew out of several months of reporting and research by my colleague Kimberly Weisul:
With the Fundery, you can discover who's looking to invest in female CEOs and diverse founding teams, in specific industries, geographical areas, and funding stages. Check back in as we continue to update it with new funds, and share this new resource with every female founder you know.
(And if you have a fund that specializes in investing in women or other under-represented founders, let us know!)
Secondly, last year Inc. and sister publication Fast Company published our first-ever annual survey of women founders. As I wrote about for Inc., and for this newsletter, the survey touched on everything from your business ambitions and experiences to your political activity, economic outlook, #MeToo reactions, and work-life balance.
We’re doing it again this year, and will be sending out surveys soon; if you’re a woman who’s founded a business, request a survey here.
Lady Bits
--Thanks so much for all of your responses to last week’s newsletter about these atrocious state abortion bans and the hypocrisy of the anti-choice crowd. This USA Today roundup of credible research also shows just how small, if vocal and damaging, this crowd is; the stats show that most Americans – including many Catholics -- think that abortion should be legal to some extent.
--Happy birthday to my friend Becky, my travel buddy for this eye-opening trip to Turkey years ago and for many excellent adventures since!
--There have been, conservatively, many millions of words already spilled online about the rushed and poorly-written and misogynist and racist Game of Thrones finale, so I’ll try to restrain myself. (On the one hand, this is why I stopped watching the show, so what did I expect from the ending? On the other hand, it was so bad that it’s kind of fun to pick apart why!) Two brief thoughts:
1. On a macro level, this was the reverse of the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend finale, which sacrificed some plot realism and pacing for the sake of character consistency and growth. Whereas Game of Thrones “kind of forgot” most of its character growth and instead wound up using its characters like dolls it needed to move to the place to do the thing to make the scene that the bro writers thought would be, like, really cool.
2. Bran Stark, secret supervillain or poorly-written Tickle Me Elmo? This gets at some of the show’s worst writing fails, including its unwillingness to define or play by the fantasy-universe rules: If you introduce a magically omniscient character whose actions lead to genocide … and who winds up as king … either you “kind of forgot” to put some limits on his omniscience, or Jon Snow needs to glum back from beyond the wall to take out another one of his family’s Sudden Nazi Dictators. Related, nerd giggle of the week:
Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com