This is a guest post by Astia, an organisation assisting women-led high growth finance companies in their route to VC financing, and a partner of The NextWomen. Sarah Travel of Bessemer Ventures has collected data about women in VC backed companies.

I speak to venture backed startups all the time. Unfortunately, more often than not, I don’t see a single female on the executive team roster. Over time, I’ve developed a hypothesis. For some reason, in the rare occurrence when I speak to a female CEO, it’s felt to me that I’m much more likely to find another female face on the company roster. It got me curious: Is this true? Are there actually more female executives in female-CEO led companies than male-led companies? If so, there are a number of implications.
To answer this question, Christine Klemke, COO of Sense Networks and I have done some good old fashioned data collecting. Unfortunately, this has been a much more time consuming task than we had expected, so we’ve only gone through the US portfolio of three VCs: Accel, my firm Bessemer, and Sequoia (210 companies in total).
Given the small sample size, and the hot-button nature of the subject, let me first disclose what this data set is *not*:

So what did I find in the intial sample?

• There were 1219 male executives (90% of sample) vs. 134 female executives (10% of sample).
• 3.8% of the CEOs were women (8 out of 210). (Which coincidentally, is around the percentage of women who are CEO of a Fortune 500 company – 3%.)
• 125 of the 210 companies (60%) did not have a single female on the executive team.

Now the money question: In male-led vs. female-led companies, if we exclude the CEOs in both cases, what percentage of the executive team is female on average?

If this turns out to be directionally correct, there are a number of repercussions. But in the absence of a more complete data set, I'm reserving judgment for now.