Women Venture Capitalists in social and traditional funds

In this thesis traditional and social Venture Capital funds are analysed from a gender perspective to extrapolate the differences in terms of management teams. Do women have to study more to achieve the same role of men in Venture Capital funds? Are social funds more open to a female management team? Is there a positive relation between the female presence in the management team and women founded funds? The study addresses these and many other questions and identifies, through a comparison between traditional and social impact funds, some of the crucial implications on the current and future role of women. To this aim, it has firstly been conducted a systematic review of the literature on gender diversity, on impact investing and on the current status of women entrepreneurs and Venture Capitalists. Then, an existing database extrapolated from Crunchbase has been enriched through a meticulous collection of data about the listed funds and partners. Finally, the descriptive statistics allowed to describe and understand the features of the sample introducing, besides the gender perspective, also the distinction between social and traditional funds. The results obtained mainly confirm the most prominent issues arisen from the literature and constitute a contribution to the research in this area and a support for further analyses.