Tag: Female

Louvre Will get Its First Feminine Chief in 228 Years

Post author By
Post date May 26, 2021

Asked what it means to be a woman running the most visited and largest museum in the world, she replied: “Things are really changing for women in the museum world. Of the 70 curators in the Louvre, more than half of them are women. More women are heading museums, especially in Europe. And younger women are much more confident these days.”

A few months ago, it was assumed that Martinez, the Louvre’s president since 2013, was assured a third term. Under his tenure, the Louvre grew past 10 million visitors for the first time. Its Leonardo exhibition, which ended a few weeks before France went into a nationwide lockdown last year, drew rave reviews and a record million visitors.

Yet critics accused Martinez of an authoritarian style that ignored the advice of his curators and a cheapening the museum’s brand by forming partnerships with brands like Uniqlo, allowing a couple to spend a night in the museum as part of a marketing campaign for Airbnb. (The Louvre also leased its space to Beyoncé and Jay-Z to film the music video for their song “Apes**t” and features prominently in the Netflix hit “Lupin,” one of the platform’s most-watched series.)

In March, after a dispute over a new color scheme in one of the Louvre’s galleries became a weekslong talking point in France’s news media, Henri Loyrette, a former president of the museum, threw his weight behind Martinez’s critics. He gave testimony in a lawsuit brought by the Cy Twombly Foundation, which said a new paint job had disfigured a ceiling mural by the abstract American painter.

Martinez will continue at the museum, which reopened on May 19 after months of being closed, until Aug. 31. He will then become a heritage ambassador, responsible for coordinating France’s participation in international projects.

Des Cars learned of Macron’s decision on Monday, when she was visiting the Musée d’Orsay with her parents and other family members and received a call on her cellphone from the culture minister, Roselyne Bachelot. “My heart beat much faster,” she said. “The Louvre is the heart of Paris. The building itself goes back 800 years. It’s a former royal palace that became a public institution that belongs to the culture of France and also to the citizens of the world. It was quite an emotional moment.”

Tags Female, Leader, Louvre, years

Business

Companies Search to Assist Feminine Caregivers Return to Workforce: Stay Updates

Post author By
Post date May 19, 2021

A homebound resident in the Bronx receives a dose of coronavirus vaccine. A new initiative is pushing for federally funded family and medical leave, and affordable child care and elder care.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…James Estrin/The New York Times

JPMorgan Chase, Spotify, Uber, McDonald’s and almost 200 other businesses have formed a coalition focused on ensuring that women are not held back in the labor force because they bear the brunt of caregiving in the United States.

The new Care Economy Business Council, the creation of which was announced on Wednesday, portrays the effort in stark economic terms, arguing that fixing the crumbling child and elder care systems is essential to the economic recovery.

Led by Time’s Up, the advocacy organization founded by powerful women in Hollywood, the council aims to bring executives together to share ways to improve workplace policies and to pressure Congress to pass policy changes that would help people — particularly women — get back to work. The council will push for federally funded family and medical leave, affordable child care and elder care, and elevated wages for caregiving workers.

“What I’m seeing now that I have not seen in the many years I’ve been working on this constellation of issues is a realization by employers that they have a stake in this,” Tina Tchen, the chief executive of Time’s Up, said.

The pandemic laid bare the faults in caregiving in the United States, particularly the problems with child care. Many child-care centers either shuttered or cut back on hours to save on costs, leaving parents without reliable and safe places for their children while they worked. The lack of child care support was a major reason that hundreds of thousands of women left the work force in the past year, bringing female labor participation rate to its lowest level since 1986.

Companies scrambled to cobble together solutions, from flexible work hours to additional child care stipends. But for many executives, the crisis made it clear that the entire system needed an overhaul.

The issue is “bigger than something we can solve on our own,” said Christy M. Pambianchi, the chief human resources officer at Verizon, which is part of the council.

President Biden’s two-part infrastructure plan proposes pumping $425 billion into expanding and strengthening child-care services and an additional $400 billion to help expand access for in-home care for older adults and those with disabilities. His plan also offers businesses a tax credit for building child-care centers in their workplaces.

Members of Congress have also introduced three separate but similar child-care bills.

Credit…Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters

Charities have an inherent interest in cryptocurrencies because, increasingly, their fates are intertwined. Nonprofit groups benefit from financial windfalls and people have recently been getting rich with crypto, the DealBook newsletter reports.

“There’s no question” that the price of cryptocurrency is linked to the volume of giving, said Joe Huston, the managing director of GiveDirectly, a global aid group. Crypto is volatile, especially in the past few days, but philanthropies have seen consistent growth in digital asset donations over time. (Bitcoin is still up 30 percent for the year, even after a torrid few trading sessions). Donations in crypto to Fidelity Charitable went from $13 million in 2019 to $28 million in 2020.

GiveDirectly has seen a “big uptick,” Mr. Huston said. The Twitter founder Jack Dorsey gave the group $12.8 million, the co-founder of the Ethereum platform Vitalik Buterin donated $4.8 million and Elon Musk of Tesla gave “some.” The cryptocurrency exchange FTX donates 1 percent of its fees and encourages traders to channel returns to charity.

But newfound riches donated in novel ways also raise questions. Mr. Buterin recently gave $1.2 billion to fund pandemic relief efforts in India. The gift was in SHIB, a crypto token named after a Shiba Inu dog that’s a derivative of the onetime joke crypto Dogecoin. These tokens were sent unbidden to Mr. Buterin to bolster their value. (To stop promoters from sending him free crypto with uncertain motives, he “burned” $6 billion worth of the tokens, taking them out of circulation permanently.)

His approach in donating tokens was “impressively lightweight and fast,” Mr. Huston said, showing how frictionless crypto-based philanthropy can be. Previously, it was unimaginable to transfer such an enormous sum without an institutional intermediary. This lack of friction also makes crypto giving prime territory for fraudsters.

“There are a lot of young people with stupid amounts of money,” said Austin Detwiler, a consultant at American Philanthropic, a consulting firm. Fund-raisers should make giving from this new generation easier, mindful that “it’s easy to start accepting crypto, but it’s volatile, so have a policy,” he said. Some donors place conditions on token gifts and some charities simply can’t tolerate the risk of holding assets that rise and fall so rapidly.

Credit…Modern Fertility

Ro, the parent company of Roman, the brand that is best known for delivering erectile dysfunction and hair loss medication to consumers, announced on Wednesday that it would acquire Modern Fertility, a start-up that offers at-home fertility tests for women.

The deal is priced at more than $225 million, according to people with knowledge of the acquisition who spoke on condition of anonymity because the information was not public. It is one of the largest investments in the women’s health care technology space, known as femtech, which attracted $592 million in venture capital in 2019, according to an analysis by PitchBook.

Modern Fertility was founded in 2017 with its flagship product: a $159 finger prick test that can estimate how many eggs a woman may have left, which can help determine which fertility method might be best.

“We essentially took the same laboratory tests that women would take in an infertility clinic and made them available to women at a fraction of the cost,” said Afton Vechery, a founder and chief executive of Modern Fertility, noting that her own test at a clinic set her back $1,500.

The company now also sells an at-home test, available at Walmart, to help track ovulation, as well as standard pregnancy tests and prenatal vitamins.

Ro, which was founded in 2017 with a focus on men’s health and was valued in March at about $5 billion, has in recent years expanded into telehealth, including delivering generic drugs by mail. In December, Ro acquired Workpath, which connects patients with in-home care providers, like nurses.

The global digital health market, which includes telemedicine, online pharmacies and wearable devices, could reach $600 billion by 2024, according to the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. And yet, by one estimate, only 1.4 percent of the money that flows into health care goes to the femtech industry, mirroring a pattern in the medical industry, which has historically overlooked women’s health research.

“Gender bias in health care research methods and funding has really contributed to sexism in medicine and health care,” said Sonya Borrero, director of the Center for Women’s Health Research and Innovation at the University of Pittsburgh. “I think we’re seeing again — gender bias in the venture capital sector is going to exactly shape what gets developed.”

That underinvestment was part of the reasoning behind the acquisition, said Zachariah Reitano, Ro’s chief executive. The company developed a female-focused online service in 2019 called Rory.

“We’re going to continue to invest hundreds of millions of dollars over the next five years into women’s health,” Mr. Reitano said, “because ultimately I think women’s health has the potential to be much larger than men’s health.”

Credit…Mike Segar/Reuters

The major management shuffle announced Tuesday by JPMorgan Chase renewed chatter about who will succeed Jamie Dimon as chief executive.

Marianne Lake, the bank’s head of consumer lending, and Jennifer Piepszak, its chief financial officer, were made joint heads of the consumer and community bank. The promotions solidify both women’s positions as contenders for chief executive.

The new setup also creates an unusual situation in which two executives competing for the top job are sharing a leadership role. That may be tricky to navigate, management experts say, and whether it’s a good test of leadership skills is debatable.

In a 2012 paper, Ryan Krause of the Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University, examined how sharing power affected the performance of public companies. Estimating the relative power of co-chief executives using proxies such as tenure and stock ownership, he and his co-authors concluded that executives who had more equal levels of power performed worse than those with disproportionate power.

“We interpret this as being evidence that, basically, having co-C.E.O.s really only works if they’re not really co-C.E.O.s,” Mr. Krause said. Co-leaders of a division, he said, may be more successful because they can more easily divide responsibilities instead of sharing authority. Such setups are not uncommon at JPMorgan.

It could highlight the ability to work collaboratively, said Steve Odland, the head of the Conference Board and the former chief executive of Office Depot and AutoZone.

“Whenever you’re in a C.E.O. successor position, it’s difficult because there are a lot of things that have to go right and you’re under the microscope,” Mr. Odland said. “But to do so with your competitor, and have to compete with your co-head, at the same time you’re making it work is especially stressful. Which is why it’s an interesting test, because the person who succeeds at this should be amply able to succeed in the C.E.O. role.”

But is it a good idea? Dan Ciampa, an adviser to chief executives and directors during leadership transitions, said that he generally would not recommend such a test.

“It may make sense to have co-division leaders or co-unit leaders and maybe even co-C.E.O.s,” Mr. Ciampa said. “But to use that as a way to determine who the next person should be to run the entire organization, to me it says that the board and the sitting C.E.O. and the head of H.R. have probably not done their homework.”

Credit…Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

The Biden administration’s efforts to provide $4 billion in debt relief to minority farmers is encountering stiff resistance from banks, which are complaining that the government initiative to pay off the loans of borrowers who have faced decades of financial discrimination will cut into their profits and hurt investors.

The debt relief was approved as part of the stimulus package that Congress passed in March and was intended to make amends for the discrimination that Black and other nonwhite farmers have faced from lenders and the Department of Agriculture over the years.

But no money has yet gone out the door.

Instead, the program has become mired in controversy and lawsuits. In April, white farmers who claim that they are victims of discrimination sued the U.S.D.A. over the initiative, writes The New York Times’s Alan Rappeport.

Now, three of the biggest banking groups are waging their own fight and complaining about the cost of being repaid early. Their argument stems from the way banks make money from loans and how they decide where to extend credit.

By allowing borrowers to repay their debts early, the lenders are being denied income they have long expected, they argue. The banks want the federal government to pay money beyond the outstanding loan amount so that banks and investors will not miss out on interest income that they were expecting or money that they would have made reselling the loans to other investors.

Bank lobbyists have been asking the Agriculture Department to make changes to the repayment program, a U.S.D.A. official said. They are pressing the U.S.D.A. to simply make the loan payments, rather than wipe out the debt all at once. And they are warning of other repercussions.

In a letter sent last month to the agriculture secretary, the banks suggested that they might be more reluctant to extend credit if the loans were quickly repaid, leaving minority farmers worse off in the long run. The intimation was viewed as a threat by some organizations that represent Black farmers.

The U.S.D.A. has shown no inclination to reverse course.

Stocks on Wall Street extended the week’s losses on Wednesday, following a slump in Europe, as traders weighed fresh data on inflation and concerns from central banks about the recovery.

The S&P 500 fell 1.2 percent in early trading, after dropping 0.9 percent on Tuesday. Technology stocks led the declines, with the Nasdaq composite falling more than 1.5 percent in early trading.

The Stoxx Europe 600 index was 1.8 percent lower, while the FTSE 100 in Britain lost 1.5 percent. Stock markets in Asia ended the day mainly lower, with the Nikkei in Japan down by 1.3 percent.

Volatility in stock markets lately has been driven by sentiment about inflation. Investors are nervous that a jump in prices — coming as global economies reopen and while the government continues to pump stimulus funds to spur growth — could push the Federal Reserve and other central banks to raise interest rates or take other measures to cool growth. That would be bad news for riskier investments like stocks.

The Fed and other central banks have said they see the recent increases as transitory caused partly by supply chain issues as economies revive from lockdowns, and that they have no plans to remove emergency support for the economy.

Bitcoin’s slump

Bitcoin has dropped more than 22 percent in 24 hours, to about $34,000, according to CoinDesk. The cryptocurrency was above $63,000 about a month ago.
One factor behind the decline was China’s announcement that it would ban banks and payment companies from providing services related to cryptocurrency transactions.
The drop has hit shares of companies in the cryptocurrency industry hard. Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange, fell 10 percent in early trading Wednesday, and Riot Blockchain slid more than 12 percent.
Tesla, the electric vehicle maker that recently invested $1.5 billion on bitcoin, was down 4 percent. But Tesla also recently reversed a decision to accept payment for its cars in Bitcoin, a decision that has helped fuel the cryptocurrency’s recent decline.

Inflation data

On Wednesday, Britain said its inflation rate more than doubled to an annual rate of 1.5 percent in April. Still the jump was in line with expectations, and reflects an adjustment from slumping prices a year ago.

The eurozone is also seeing higher prices. The annualized inflation rate in April was 1.6 percent among countries using the euro, up from a 1.3 percent rate the month before, Eurostat reported. Fuel costs were cited as the main driver.

The word from central banks

But the European Central Bank issued a warning on Wednesday that, although eurozone economies were improving, “the pandemic will leave a legacy of higher debt and weaker balance sheets, which — if unaddressed — could prompt sharp market corrections and financial stress or lead to a prolonged period of weak economic recovery.”
The bank, in its latest Financial Stability Review, also pointed to the “remarkable exuberance” in the stock markets as U.S. Treasury yields have risen amid inflation concerns. “The buoyancy of financial markets has stood in contrast to weaker economic fundamentals,” the report said. The bank called for continued support for hard-hit sectors that remain vulnerable, like hospitality, arts and entertainment.
Federal Reserve policymakers will release the minutes from their April meeting on Wednesday.

Amazon said Tuesday that it would indefinitely prohibit police departments from using its facial recognition tool, extending a moratorium the company announced last year during nationwide protests over racism and biased policing. When Amazon announced the pause in June, it did not cite a specific reason for the change. The company said it hoped a year was enough time for Congress to create legislation regulating the ethical use of facial recognition technology. Congress has not banned the technology, or issued any significant regulations on it, but some cities have.
Google held its I/O developer conference on Tuesday. And, as usual, it was a dizzying two-hour procession of new features, products and services across the company’s vast array of businesses, from its smartphone software to its artificial intelligence systems. Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google’s parent company Alphabet, revealed the company’s next so-called moonshot: Google aims to power the entire company using carbon-free energy by 2030. It will require using artificially intelligent software systems to allocate energy wisely as well as investments to tap into geothermal energy in addition to wind and solar.

Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Fox News Media, the Rupert Murdoch-controlled cable group, filed a motion on Tuesday to dismiss a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought against it in March by Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company that accused Fox News of propagating lies that ruined its reputation after the 2020 presidential election.

The Dominion lawsuit and a similar defamation claim brought in February by another election company, Smartmatic, have been widely viewed as test cases in a growing legal effort to battle disinformation in the news media. And it is another byproduct of former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless attempts to undermine President Biden’s clear victory.

In a 61-page response filed in Delaware Superior Court, the Fox legal team argues that Dominion’s suit threatened the First Amendment powers of a news organization to chronicle and assess newsworthy claims in a high-stakes political contest.

“A free press must be able to report both sides of a story involving claims striking at the core of our democracy,” Fox says in the motion, “especially when those claims prompt numerous lawsuits, government investigations and election recounts.” The motion adds: “The American people deserved to know why President Trump refused to concede despite his apparent loss.”

Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox News presented the circumstances in a different light.

Dominion is among the largest manufacturers of voting machine equipment and its technology was used by more than two dozen states last year. Its lawsuit described the Fox News and Fox Business cable networks as active participants in spreading a false claim, pushed by Mr. Trump’s allies, that the company had covertly modified vote counts to manipulate results in favor of Mr. Biden. Lawyers for Mr. Trump shared those claims during televised interviews on Fox programs.

“Lies have consequences,” Dominion’s lawyers wrote in their initial complaint. “Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process.” The lawsuit cites instances where Fox hosts, including Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo, uncritically repeated false claims about Dominion made by Mr. Trump’s lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell.

A representative for Dominion, whose founder and employees received threatening messages after the negative coverage, did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday night.

Fox News Media has retained two prominent lawyers to lead its defense: Charles Babcock, who has a background in media law, and Scott Keller, a former chief counsel to Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas. Fox has also filed to dismiss the Smartmatic suit; that defense is being led by Paul D. Clement, a former solicitor general under President George W. Bush.

“There are two sides to every story,” Mr. Babcock and Mr. Keller wrote in a statement on Tuesday. “The press must remain free to cover both sides, or there will be a free press no more.”

The Fox motion on Tuesday argues that its networks “had a free-speech right to interview the president’s lawyers and surrogates even if their claims eventually turned out to be unsubstantiated.” It argues that the security of Dominion’s technology had been debated in prior legal claims and media coverage, and that the lawsuit did not meet the high legal standard of “actual malice,” a reckless disregard for the truth, on the part of Fox News and its hosts.

Media organizations, in general, enjoy strong protections under the First Amendment. Defamation suits are a novel tactic in the battle over disinformation, but proponents say the strategy has shown some early results. The conservative news outlet Newsmax apologized last month after a Dominion employee, in a separate legal case, accused the network of spreading baseless rumors about his role in the election. Fox Business canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight” a day after Smartmatic sued Fox in February and named Mr. Dobbs as a co-defendant.

Jonah E. Bromwich contributed reporting.

Tags Businesses, Caregivers, Female, Live, return, Seek, Updates, workforce

Politics

Promotions for Feminine Generals Had been Delayed Over Fears of Trump’s Response

Post author By
Post date February 18, 2021

Promotions for Female Generals Were Delayed Over Fears of Trump’s Reaction

“It was about timing, not that it was women,” Miller, who served as acting Secretary of Defense for nearly three months, said in an interview.

Had Mr Trump won re-election, General Milley would most likely have sent the recommendations to the White House for approval, hoping for the best. But the General and Mr. Esper felt that under a Biden administration, the selection process was faced with a smoother selection process.

Mr. Biden and Mr. Austin could always select other candidates, but Mr. Esper and General Milley were confident that the new team would confirm their selection, which had been reviewed and evaluated over several months.

Col. Dave Butler, spokesman for General Milley, declined to comment on the article.

General Van Ovost is already a four-star officer who heads the Air Force Mobility Command at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois. Of the 43 four-star generals and admirals in the US military, she is the only woman. General Van Ovost, a seasoned Air Force Academy graduate who was selected to lead the multiservice transport command, also located at Scott Air Force Base, played out her strengths.

General Richardson is the three-star commander of the Army component of the Pentagon’s North Command in San Antonio, which plays an important role in the military support for FEMA’s Covid vaccination program.

“Very capable, great team builder,” said Anthony R. Ierardi, a retired commander of the Army’s First Cavalry Division, which included General Richardson, in an email. “Get things done.”

Tags delayed, fears, Female, Generals, Promotions, Reaction, Trumps

World News

Scottish College Attracts Ire for Dismissing Feminine Gender Research Lead

Post author By
Post date February 15, 2021

Scottish University Draws Ire for Dismissing Female Gender Studies Lead

Arantza Asali, currently a graduate student, said she never thought St. Andrews would graduate, get the praise and tuition money she deserved, and then do so.

“The neglect of our education and the well-being of our employees is unacceptable,” she wrote on Twitter.

In the past, concerns have been raised about the global under-representation of women in philosophy. And those who drew attention to the university’s decision not to renew Ms. Kerr’s contract point to the broader questions in her philosophy department.

According to the letter in their support, as of this month, of the department’s 35 members of the academic and scientific staff, only 12 were women, while of these 12 women only five have permanent positions (one of which is part-time), two are visiting scholars , three are professorial fellows who are not primarily employed by the university, and two have fixed-term contracts, including Dr. Kerr.

The department’s 19 full-time employees include only four women, and one woman does not hold a permanent junior position. Of the 57 Ph.D. of the student division, only 13 are women.

Scientists around the world have expressed their support for Dr. Kerr voiced on social media.

“Absolutely shameful and part of a long list of layoffs by women and BAME scientists in recent years,” wrote Dr. Camilla Mork Rostvik, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Leeds, on Twitter under an acronym for black commonly used in the UK. Asian and “ethnic minorities”.

“This is a profound injustice and just an incredible mistake,” wrote Jonathan Ichikawa, associate professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia. “Your work is exemplary and there is no one with adequate expertise willing to replace it.”

Tags Dismissing, Draws, Female, Gender, Ire, Lead, Scottish, Studies, University

Business

Bumble IPO a win for feminine founders, enterprise capital funds nonetheless low

Post author By
Post date February 11, 2021

Bumble IPO a win for female founders, venture capital funds still low

Whitney Wolfe Herd speaks on stage during the Fortune Most Powerful Women Next Gen conference at Monarch Beach Resort on November 13, 2017 in Dana Point, California.

Joe Scarnici | Getty Images Entertainment

When 31-year-old Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd goes public this week, she will be known not only for her youth, but also as one of the few founders to have her company go public.

It’s a fitting achievement for the founder of a dating app that aims to put women in the driver’s seat. But it also hammers home the still unsuitable playing field for entrepreneurs.

Bumble, whose board of directors is 73% women, is slated to begin trading on the Nasdaq a few days before Valentine’s Day on Thursday. The company will sell its shares at $ 43 per share and raise $ 2.2 billion from investors. The offering initially valued the company at more than $ 7 billion.

The market reaction will serve as the litmus test of investing in women-owned businesses.

Today, women make up 7.4% of Fortune 500 CEOs – an all-time high, but still an astonishingly low number. Even fewer women founders of public limited companies. Nasdaq estimates that only 20 of the US public companies active today were led by their founder through the IPO.

Women’s funding falls as global deals rise

The problem is not a lack of women entrepreneurs, but a lack of support where it matters: funding.

In a 2018 study, the Boston Consulting Group found “a significant gender gap in new business financing.” According to the study, investments in businesses founded or co-founded by women averaged $ 935,000, less than half the average $ 2.1 million men receive.

Even so, startups founded by women and co-founded made 78 cents for every dollar invested, while startups founded by men made only 31 cents.

Covid-19 could be the greatest threat to female founders.

Matt Krentz

Managing Director and Senior Partner of the Boston Consulting Group

The pandemic has only widened this gap.

In 2020, global risk finance increased 13% year over year, while investments in women decreased 27%. In the meantime, the proportion of women founders who were only assigned to female founders has fallen from 2.8% to 2.3%, according to Crunchbase data. This is due to the fact that women, often primary caregivers, are said to be more affected by the pandemic overall.

“The convergence of crises – demands for racial justice, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Covid-19 and an economic downturn – makes this a crucial moment for business integration, justice and diversity,” said Matt Krentz, Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG and The study co-authored, said CNBC. “Of all these problems, Covid-19 could be the greatest threat to female founders.”

Redirect investments where they are needed

The economic benefits of investing in women are well documented. By some estimates, equal business participation by men and women could add $ 5 trillion to the global economy.

And companies and institutions seem to be listening now. Many have made bold commitments to better support gender equality and female founders.

What female founders need is simple and equal access to financial investments.

Tanya Rolfe

managing partner, Her Capital

“Awareness of the funding gap and the impact of different leadership teams is better understood, and investors have begun to ask directly about the diversity of founders and leadership teams,” said Krentz.

Too often, however, these investments are poorly channeled, according to Tanya Rolfe, managing partner at Her Capital, a women-run venture capital company that focuses on female founders in Southeast Asia.

“Women seem to be at the center of a lot of additional mentoring, which only suggests that women are missing something,” said Rolfe. “What female founders need is simple and equal access to financial investments.”

Tanya Rolfe, managing partner of Singapore-based venture capital firm Her Capital.

Your capital

To achieve this, more diversity is needed at the fund manager level, Rolfe said.

According to All Raise, a nonprofit focused on accelerating the success of female founders and funders, women made up just 13% of all venture capitalists in 2020. An estimated 11% of fund managers were women, All Raise said.

“If we want to see diversity at the founder level, we need to invest in diversity at the capital allocator level – fund managers like me,” continued Rolfe. “It is almost more important to invest in venture capital funds with specific strategies for investing in different founders. This is where we will see the major changes.”

Revision of traditional investment figures

Nevertheless, various funds continue to face an uphill battle.

Since many are still in their infancy and have little success, they are usually outside the investment criteria of the institutes. As a result, managers often seek less lucrative and more time-consuming deals from private investors.

Pippa Lamb, a partner in early-stage mutual fund Sweet Capital, says such an approach needs to be revised.

The pricing of perceived risk based on a person’s race or gender is very out of date to me.

Pippa Lamb

Partner, Sweet Capital

“The pricing of perceived risk based on a person’s race or gender is very out of date to me,” said Lamb. “I would guess top-tier institutional investors are ready to do the job for full diligence managers no matter what they look like.”

“We need more diverse representation in all areas of the start-up ecosystem,” she said, citing female founders, female board members, female venture capitalists and female institutional investors. “When it comes to raising capital, the latter two are most critical, especially at the limited partner (LP) level: the investor’s investors.”

BCG’s Krentz hopes the tide will turn.

“Investors should understand that current market forces offer promising opportunities for women-owned companies,” he said. “The lack of funding means that there is less competition for women-supported companies and, on average, these companies perform better than companies with all male founders.”

But until this understanding grows, Rolfe and Lamb’s advice to female founders is simple: keep going.

“Women can do the same thing that male founders do to attract investors,” said Rolfe. “If you’re a great founder with a solid business plan and traction to prove your execution and thesis, that should be enough.”

Tags Bumble, Capital, Female, Founders, funds, IPO, venture, win

Business

How Excessive-Finish Eating places Have Failed Black Feminine Cooks

Post author By
Post date January 11, 2021

How High-End Restaurants Have Failed Black Female Chefs

In response, the company announced that its senior management team had been working with an inclusion expert, Dr. James Pogue, collaborates on anti-bias training. The company has vowed to “keep diversity and inclusion in mind,” a spokeswoman said, and “create safe forums for everyone at USHG to have awkward, challenging conversations about race and bias”. (This reporter’s husband has worked for the restaurant group in the past.)

Ms. Ettarh said such discussions are as important as recruiting more black workers. “I think the white leadership is so concerned about hiring black people, but they have to change the culture,” she said.

Facing the past should be part of the process for restaurants in general, she said. “They are not quoted as being transparent about what they want to do to get better, but they are not transparent about how they have let down all the blacks who have worked for them,” she said. “I generally think that good food doesn’t support its workers well.”

Some women don’t wait for the industry to change.

Catina Smith, the founder of Just Call Me Chef, a biennial national organization for black women in the hospitality industry, has members in 10 cities and hosts in-person events in addition to an online community that connects women from around the world.

Ms. Smith, 34, a line chef in Baltimore who now works there as a private chef and cooking teacher, said she started the group after suffering from the shortage of black cooks in the kitchens she worked in. “My last kitchen job was all white men and nothing felt like it was really for us,” she said.

Ms. Smith plans to hold the group’s first conference in Baltimore next June to unite black women in hospitality. The goal is not to focus on what they have been denied, but rather to celebrate their skills and talents and provide mentoring to young chefs.

“We don’t cry because we can’t get into these rooms, we just say how it is for us,” she said. “We don’t want any special treatment. We just want the opportunity. “

Tags Black, Chefs, Failed, Female, HighEnd, Restaurants