Here’s a simple explanation for why so few women get funding in the tech industry from the predominantly male venture capitalists who dole out the cash: Some of these guys have some pretty old-fashioned views about women.

For starters, when women startup founders come around looking for funding, some male venture capitalists start comparing them to their wives, writes tech entrepreneur Sarah Nadav in a scathing post on Medium on Monday.

She helpfully included this text exchange to illustrate the problem:

Courtesy Sarah Nadav

To translate it for you, this guy thinks the reason more women don’t get funding is because they’d rather just be at home raising their kids. 

This view is more the result of bias than any real empirical evidence. Women start and run millions of companies in the U.S. Indeed, 36 percent of all businesses — about 10 million of them — in the United States are owned by women, according to 2012 data from the U.S. Small Business Administration

However, that doesn’t mean the texting venture capitalist knows any of these women — or really very many women in business at all. Only 6 percent of the partners in venture capital firms are women, according to one widely cited study from Babson College 

And these male-dominated firms tend to invest in male-dominated companies.

Businesses with all-male executive teams are four times as likely to get venture funding than companies with even one woman on their team, according to a foundational study on the issue from Babson College.

So when this VC talks about the women he knows, he probably does mostly know his wife and his mom.

In her post, Nadav asks male VCs to please stop asking how she is going to manage her kids and her business.

“When you ask me about having it all, or how am I going to manage my kids, I seriously think that you are insane,” writes Nadav, who is about to launch a new financial startup. “Because in my head, I can’t imagine a scenario where you trust someone with millions of dollars to run a business but think that they don’t know how to deal with childcare.”

The tendency to see women primarily as wives or caretakers is why when the Republican presidential candidates were asked to name an American woman to place on the $10 bill, several could only think to name their mothers.

Last year, HuffPost talked to Aileen Lee, the founder of Cowboy Ventures and the investor who coined the term unicorn to describe billion-dollar startups. We spoke about the subtle biases men in the industry sometimes had about women.

Lee described a time when a CEO her firm funds introduced her to a man she was about to interview for an executive position, in part by describing her as a “super-mom.”

“Who would ever introduce an investor candidate as a ‘superdad,’” she asked. “So weird.”

The issue of course isn’t that women can’t be “supermoms” or that some woman choose to stay home with their kids. 

The problem is that men in this very important sector of the economy aren’t seeing women as their peers and equals. There are plenty of super-successful women entrepreneurs out there, and plenty of historically significant American women available to place on the currency. 

These guys would do well to take Nadav’s advice and shush about their wives. 

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