Could the problem possibly be, asked Caroline Criado Perez in her book Invisible Women, that we have “woman-blind tech, created by a woman-blind tech industry and funded by woman-blind investors”?
She was writing about the type of gender myopia that led to Apple launching a “comprehensive” health app in 2014 that included tracking of molybdenum and copper intake but not periods. Or wearables that aren’t, in fact, very wearable for half the adult population. Or products, like a radically better-designed breast pump or a pelvic floor trainer, that (unlike molybdenum apparently) were dismissed as too niche.
While Silicon Valley may encapsulate this phenomenon in particularly pure form, it’s a problem that reaches far beyond the California borders.
The venture capital industry remains remarkably undiverse. Only 12 per cent of decision makers at US funds are women, according to an Axios study, while more than 60 per cent of funds had no female decision makers at all. In the UK about 13 per cent of senior investment professionals were women, found Diversity VC in 2019: more than 80 per cent of firms surveyed had no women on their investment committees.