Delta Blockchain Fund's Kavita Gupta explains why women need their fair share of representation in emerging tech

Investor and venture capitalist Kavita Gupta pointed out that there is a need to improve participation of women in emerging technologies, like crypto, Web3, artificial intelligence, etc.

“It is evident that women’s participation in tech is limited, but this has also trickled down into the newer avenues of tech like Web3 and AI. There is an alarming need to correct this,” she said.

According to Skillsoft's Women in Tech Report, 2022, only 7 per cent women held executive-level positions. Only 13 per cent women were at director level while 17 per cent held mid-level manager positions.

Gupta, who is the General Partner of Delta Blockchain Fund, a US-based VC fund focusing on early stage investing in emerging technologies, highlighted that not just participation, but also representation of women in the emerging technologies has a certain bias.

She explained with an example: “I say there is an alarming need to address this issue because with emerging technologies, the effect of lack of representation and participation is going to grow manifold. For example, there are well reported instances that AI models used by some big tech companies to filter out resumes in early stages of recruitment favoured candidates with male sounding names over female sounding names.

“You know why this happened, it is because the model was trained on data that had bias against women. Instances like this show that there is a strong need for transparency as use of emerging tech becomes more ubiquitous."

Carnegie Mellon University’s research highlights a similar incidence where Amazon’s machine learning algorithm used for recruiting had a bias against women. The algorithm was scrapped after the bias was reported.

Gupta also noted that along with transparency, there is also a need for participation of women. In the same breath, she added that this participation has to be beyond token participation for the sake of maintaining diversity.

She said, “It is well understood that there is a need for more women in tech. Some steps are also being taken towards this, you have reserved seats in management and C-suite, but the participation has to be beyond this. Women leaders need to be nurtured from early on in their careers and even before that.”

Gupta noted that defining clear career paths help retain women in the tech sector. “I have been a guest lecturer at Stanford for some years now and I see a relatively healthy balance of men and women taking my class. But why does this healthy balance not reflect out in the real world? It is because some women are dropping out and choosing other options. We need to solve for them, show them a clearly defined career path.”

As per data from the World Bank, women make up nearly 43 per cent of the total STEM graduates. But, they make up just 14 per cent of scientists, engineers and technologists in research development institutions and universities.

On the question of participation of women in startups and venture capital, she further said: “The ratios are skewed there as well. On one hand, there is a very very low number of female founders. In my current fund, we have 50 odd companies and less than 10 per cent of those companies have female founders. On the other hand, when you talk about VCs and investors, there are only a handful of funds run by female investors.”

According to data from the Harvard Business Review, companies founded solely by women receive less than 3 per cent of all venture capital investments. Moreover, women account for less than 15 per cent of check-writers in venture capital investing.

“This means there are very few role models. Also, they might act as bottlenecks when more women want to take part in the ecosystem,” the VC explained.