Just How Many Women VCs Are There In the Valley?

In the wake of the discrimination lawsuit at Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, the heightened attention to Silicon Valley diversity continues. The National Venture Capital Association approached the issue by doing an informal survey trying to assess women’s representation within U.S. firms, and found that 11 percent of women at U.S. firms identify themselves as “investors”:

The life sciences and clean technology industries had the highest percentage of women investors at 18 percent and 15 percent respectively. Information technology (IT) followed with women representing 12 percent of business-to-business IT investors and 11 percent of consumer IT investors. The lowest percentage of women investors was in the non-high tech products and services sector at eight percent.

Extrapolating from those numbers, Forbes focused on women in technology VCs specifically,  looking at ”six prominent firms in California’s techland — Kleiner, Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark Capital and Greylock Partners” and found that the combined average was just 6.7 percent.

Writer Connie Guglielmo hears from some of those firms — the ones who would even respond — about why that might be, here.

(via @kapriforce)