TXWSW Blog: Venture Capital and Pay Gap News; How Bill Gates Leads By Example for Men Everywhere

Happy Tuesday!
Huge thank you to Julie Shaw for organizing such great content and speakers at our family office event series last week. Many thanks also to our speakers for doing such a great job in sharing their expertise with our members.
Two articles from Fortune this week: we know there is a great divide in the world of venture capital when it comes to funding for women. Sarah Kunst is one of the few black women who has both worked in VC and launched a start-up. In her article she notes that the outlook is even bleaker for women of color. A study revealed that “black women head up just 4% of women-led startups and raise an average $36,000 in funding—or about .01% of the money pulled in by the average successful startup.” The full article can be found here: http://fortune.com/2016/02/22/just-4-of-female-led-startups-are-run-by-black-women-im-one-of-them/
In the second article, the title says it all – one in five HR managers admit that women at their companies get paid less than men. Read on: http://fortune.com/2016/02/26/hr-managers-wage-gap/
One of the ramifications of gender pay discrimination is that women make less money over their career, and as 40% of them represent the head of a single parent household, the reduced earnings lead to the ability to save less for retirement. This brings us to the next article which notes that since women are unable to retire, they are working longer and this is reshaping our economy. The full article can be found here:http://www.wsj.com/articles/older-women-reshape-u-s-job-market-1456192536
Which brings me to all the unpaid work women do – men spend the bulk of their time working for money while women do the bulk of the unpaid work – namely cooking, cleaning and childcare. In the US women spend about 4 hours a day on unpaid work compared to 2.5 hours for men, and that gap starts in childhood with more chores being given to girls, and parents are more likely to pay boys for their chores so we get socialized at an early age to do this unpaid work. The ramifications of spending hours on unpaid work is less time available to women for schooling and paid work, and a further widening of the pay gap. Does this feel like an exhausting cycle to anyone else? The full article can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/upshot/how-society-pays-when-womens-work-is-unpaid.html?_r=0
The good news is the Gates Foundation has made addressing unpaid work for women one of their priorities this year. And this is not just lip service: when Bill Gates was CEO of Microsoft, he was driving their daughter to pre-school two days a week to share the workload with Melinda. Read on:https://www.gatesnotes.com/2016-Annual-Letter?WT.mc_id=02_23_2016_04_AL2016_BG-LI_&WT.tsrc=BGLI
I hope you will all join us on April 28th for TXWSW 7th annual State of the Markets event – we are thrilled and honored to have an all-star line-up of CIOs who will share their opinions on their market outlook. The panelists this year include Janet Handley, CIO of the Texas A&M Endowment, Katherine Nixon, CIO of Northern Trust, Carol McFate, CIO of Xerox Corporation and Paul Ballard, CIO of Texas Treasury Safekeeping & Trust Company. For our sponsor breakfast on April 29th, we will have secured the Editor of “The Daily Shot” as our keynote speaker.  Tickets are on sale and sponsorships are available. We thank you all for your continued support as we continue to grow and look forward to seeing you all soon!
Very kind regards
 
Christine

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