Before getting to how one prominent Australian VC firm chose to acknowledge International Women’s Day (and later apologising), it’s important to get some context about women and venture capital in this country.
In 2022, just 3 per cent of VC funding went to all-female-founded startups in 2022, and just 10 per cent of all such funding went to startup teams with at least one female co-founder.
Meanwhile, a survey of startup founders found 83 per cent of women believe their gender has impacted their ability to raise external capital, compared with 14 per cent of men.
And all of this is despite the startup ecosystem in Australia “booming” in recent years, as the State of Australian Startup Funding report found.
Yet just 23 per cent of the deals done in 2022 featured one female founder. The report mentioned above that women still face “significant challenges in securing capital”.
As for the top venture capital firms in Australia? Just one in three invested in a woman founder in 2022.
Sounds like IWD 2023 should have been a great opportunity for prominent VC firms to highlight the female founders that they actually do support, and discuss how they aim to support more female founders in the future.
Or even just to highlight these dire figures and the reality for women in startups in Australia — to bring more awareness to the extreme lack of equity across this sector and the numerous challenges women continue to face in securing funding in 2023.
VC firm OneVentures took a different and rather unique approach. They published a post showcasing nine men, as “allies” of women on IWD.
Now before we go further, here is some context about OneVentures.
OneVentures has a gender split within its own partnership ranks and was co founded by a woman. This is rare and should be celebrated, with VC traditionally being a male-dominated field. But the firm has nothing close to a gender split across the businesses it backs, which are majority all-male teams. Not one of the four biggest businesses it backs within its Ground Fund V has a female co founder and few do across its wider portfolio.
The now-deleted IWD post, initially shared by our friends at Smart Company along with their story on the firm apologising — twice, saw OneVentures declaring they are “incredibly lucky that every day feels like #IWD here at OneVentures — here are a few stats we would like to celebrate.”
Then they went on to highlight that they have a 50/50 partner split across the business, that their investment team is 55 per cent female, and that they have an equal gender split across the finance and operations team.
There were no such stats regarding the founders within the businesses it supports.
But here’s where it went really wrong. The firm, on IWD, told their LinkedIn following to “look out for the profiles of the women within the team” that they would be sharing over the coming week, highlighting their stories about #crackingthecode.
“But today, we wanted to say thank you to all the allies our firm, as we continue for equity and camaraderie.”
The image then featured a Brady Bunch-like collection of nine men — and plenty of comments that followed from people declaring it “tone deaf”.
Following the backlash, OneVentures issued an apology, saying that it is evident from comments that “the post has caused offence to some of our followers”. They said the intention behind the all-male image was to “highlight gender camaraderie” and that in hindsight, the image used was a mistake and “we can see how it could come across as insensitive.”
And like so many attempts at apologies on the internet, the apology received its own backlash.
On Thursday, Dr Michelle Deaker, a OneVentures co founder, published her own LinkedIn post responding to the backlash and declaring they have been having plenty of discussions and are taking a deep reflection at OneVentures.
“We can absolutely understand the response to our post yesterday. We made a mistake and I’m unequivocally sorry for our misjudgment.
She highlighted how IWD is a day to recognise the barriers women face in society and business and support each other in overcoming these. She said she being a tech entrepreneur and one of the first female founders of a VC firm, she has experienced such barriers firsthand and that helping others to overcome them is important to her.
OneVentures has reposted Deaker, but as yet not issued another IWD post on their LinkedIn account, as of Friday lunchtime, other than sharing a couple of paragraphs on a speech given by Deaker, highlighting her career journey to date and her work launching funds in Australia. They have not yet posted any of the stories of the women within its own that it wants to elevate.
Full credit to OneVentures though, for not declaring they were #EmbracingEquity and falling for the fake IWD theme that I’ve previously described as a weapon of mass distraction.
But OneVentures instead opted for a distraction of a different kind — by looking to its own leadership team, rather than systemic issues that continue to prevent female founders and co founders from achieving anything like the investments of their male founders. Here, OneVentures (like most VC firms in Australia) is part of the problem, given its portfolio is heavily male-dominated.
A massive 71 per cent of women founders said they plan to raise money in 2023, compared with 58 per cent of male founders, according to the State of Australian Startup Funding report. The appetite and the ambition is there. The VC sector must consider what more can be done to highlight the benefits of a more diverse startup ecosystem, and what they are doing to help make it happen.