As a woman in VC, I am always happy to see these discussions around bias and investing. In her piece, Sallie makes an important point about how, in her experience, male investment advisors spend far more time talking to husbands rather than wives in investment conversations, even when they think they’re spending equal time. As she notes, this often leads to women dumping their financial advisors after their husbands pass away. The advisors weren’t hearing their concerns or meeting their needs, and this had real financial impact on the advisors and their firms.

We see the same thing in venture capital. Women entrepreneurs are often not taken seriously by traditional investors, who in most cases are white men. One jaw-dropping study shows that male entrepreneurs are funded at a rate of 68% when narrating a business pitch deck, whereas women narrating the identical pitch deck, using exactly the same script, are funded at a rate of 31%. Ironically, there was no difference in the ratings of the businesses by women or men judges. (link: http://bit.ly/1nhLdi8)

Equally important, but unfortunately unaddressed in this piece, is that women of color have it even worse. Entrepreneurs who are women of color are targets of the added insult about how “colorblind” they are, as in “I don’t care if you’re black or brown, the only color I care about is green.”

Historically a small elite group of white men have been the builders and gatekeepers of the investment industry — everyone else has been shut out. You can’t have a conversation about gender inequality in investing without talking about the overlap with racial and ethnic bias. This is especially true as the U.S. becomes increasingly black and brown. Simply lifting the gate for similarly elite white women is not going to fix the investment industry.

We also must ask about the businesses that are being touted by investors — not only who are their founders, but also who benefits from them? Startup tech culture has been appropriately called out for launching a plethora of services helping young, single, affluent men with everything from ordering food to dating to laundry. Relatively few businesses tackle real problems impacting low income communities and communities of color.

At Kapor Capital, we believe the lived experience of diverse entrepreneurs is a strategic competitive advantage. For example, one of our entrepreneurs, Ana Roca Castro, arrived in the US from the Dominican Republic as a teenager. While she’d been a bright calculus student back home, she was assigned to remedial fourth grade math in her New York public high school. Her teachers simply assumed that she wasn’t smart because her English wasn’t great. For Ana, the memory of her frustration and humiliation eventually inspired her to found PreK12 Plaza, a successful company that would solve that problem for hundreds of thousands of immigrant children. Her platform in 25 languages significantly boosts the learning outcomes for kids, engages them and involves their parents in their native language. Entrepreneurship needs people from diverse backgrounds, who bring their experiences to the table, in order to grow new markets and expand the potential of the industry.

So, yes, investment and wealth creation is power. But the “great equalizer” has got to intersect with race and ethnicity, and deploy capital to solve real problems.