This story appears in the May 2026 issue of Utah Business. Subscribe.
When deciding where to invest, data is key. But getting ahead, finding opportunities others may have overlooked, means bringing a unique outlook to the data.
Lis Green, director of impact investing at Sorenson Impact Institute, says venture capital firms make better investments when their decision-making teams are more diverse, bringing together different backgrounds and experiences that add new insights to the data.
“The more investors we can have that represent the scope of what our society actually looks like, I think the better off venture will be,” Green says. “I think we’ll be able to unlock a lot more economic and entrepreneurial opportunity.”
However, venture capital firms across Utah and the rest of the country have traditionally missed out on perspectives from women. While the ranks of women in VCs are steadily improving, the numbers show the industry a long way from parity between men and women in leadership.
In 2025, women held 18-20% of decision-making roles at VC firms in the United States, depending on firm size, according to a PitchBook report.
In Utah, female investors and entrepreneurs fare similarly. According to data provided to Utah Business by PitchBook, women hold 20% of decision-making roles at Utah VCs with less than $50 million in assets, but only 10% at larger firms. None of these larger VCs has a majority-female decision-making team.
Green says this disparity comes from many places — the spillover of the male-dominated tech industry into VC, overall cultural disparities in how women are treated in the workplace and “self-selection” by women who don’t see themselves represented in the industry.
“When we don’t see other women who look like us in the same room, sometimes we feel less inclined to continue to seek out space and carve out space for ourselves there,” Green says.
When women aren’t in VC leadership
The “self-selection” effect does not stop at women who shy away from pursuing decision-making roles in VCs.
Rachelle Morris, co-founder and managing director at Stalwart Ventures, says fewer women in VC leadership means fewer women invest in VC funds. This is a dynamic she first noticed while working as a private wealth advisor at J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs, in Utah and elsewhere.
“My male clients would bring me funds … local funds and local deals … and would ask for my two cents on those potential investments for them,” Morris says. “And my female clients weren’t doing that.”
Morris came to the conclusion that because there were so few women in decision-making roles at Utah VC firms, local high-net-worth women were being overlooked as investors — at the expense of Utah’s capital market.
“If you have a woman who is worth $50 million or $10 million and she’s not investing in the local capital markets, she is investing her money somewhere,” Morris says. It just might be Silicon Valley instead of Silicon Slopes.
Fewer female investors and fewer women in leadership at funds can make it difficult for female entrepreneurs to secure funding for their businesses.
“Like tends to be drawn to like, and men in these decision-making seats are often drawn to men who look like them,” Green says.
According to PitchBook, companies founded by all-female teams raised just $3.2 billion in VC funding in 2025 in the U.S., compared to $191.1 billion raised by all-male founding teams. In Utah, all-female teams raised $25.3 million, while all-male teams raised $1.7 billion. In 2024, all-female teams raised only $2.28 million.
In addition to the vast funding disparity female founders face, research shows they are treated differently during fundraising. Female founders are more than twice as likely as their male counterparts to be asked about family commitments and almost five times as likely to be interrupted during pitch presentations.
Amy Cook, co-founder and chief marketing officer at Fullcast, says the unconscious bias that women are less capable as business leaders is fading, but female entrepreneurs can still approach fundraising with a lack of confidence in themselves, which can hurt investors’ confidence in them.
Cook has years of experience as an entrepreneur, but co-founding Fullcast in 2024 was the first time that she was personally involved in fundraising. During this process, in which she pitched several Utah VCs, Cook learned that no matter the business idea, investors need to believe in the person pitching.
“Women, we have been trained over time to kind of hedge our language,” Cook says. “And that is not a sign of strength, of confidence.” As Cook gained fundraising experience, she learned to communicate in numbers, avoid over-explanation and be as direct as possible about what she was after.
“I had to learn [to] never apologize for what I want to be doing.”
“There is so much economic opportunity that sits outside the parameters of very narrow, traditional venture pattern recognition. There just is.”
— Lis Green
Moving the needle toward gender parity
Morris describes women’s progress in VC as a flywheel, gaining more momentum with each new woman who enters a leadership role or makes her first investment.
“I think that this industry is small enough and niche enough that every woman at every fund … actually matters,” she says.
For Morris, the most important step to get the flywheel in motion is recruiting more female investors — and in her experience, Utah is just starting to tap into its supply. In Stalwart’s early days, Morris intentionally sought out female investors. Immediately, women began expressing interest in investing, but they had never been pitched by a fund before, and they were apprehensive about diving into something unfamiliar.
To lower the barrier to entry for first-time female investors, Stalwart lowered the minimum investment from $250,000 to $100,000. When the fund launched in 2023, 30 percent of its investors were women, and according to Morris, most of them invested $250,000 or more.
“Women are actually quite smart when it comes to making intentional decisions with their balance sheets,” Morris says. “You just have to allow them to make informed decisions, rather than talk above them or talk around them.”
While Morris is focused on increasing the number of women investors from the VC side, Cook believes female entrepreneurs also have an opportunity to help women start investing.
“Because I’m a woman, and I am friends with a lot of women, I have been able to give the opportunity to invest to other women who might not have access to it,” Cook says. “I think that is what is so spectacular about women investing and women founding.”
Even more than support from other women, Green says having “male champions” who are aware of the challenges women can face in VC and are committed to empowering women in the industry has been impactful in her career.
In her first role in VC, Green says she was hired by a male general partner who had frank conversations with her about the dynamics she could face.
“He would say, ‘You’re a woman, your voice is sometimes a little bit more timid. … There’s going to be people who will probably treat you a certain way, and you just need to preempt that and not let that get to you,’” Green says. Having these discussions and seeing that [he] was willing to stand up for her when she was overlooked by others made a difference.
What can men in VC do to increase gender parity in the industry?
Blake Modersitzki, a partner at Pelion Ventures, started thinking seriously about how to empower female investors when his daughters asked him to teach them about investing.
“As a father, I’ve been doing this [for 30 years], and I didn’t help my daughters understand this part of the world,” Modersitzki says. “And so I was like, ‘Okay, I’ve got to do something.’”
After speaking with women he knew in VC, Modersitzki realized that many women, like his daughters, were interested in investing and simply needed a space to ask questions about how things work. So, about five years ago, Pelion began hosting discussions where potential female investors could get together and learn. The questions they had — What is a limited partner? How is a venture capital firm structured? — reminded Modersitzki of questions he had asked his mentors at the beginning of his career.
Modersitzki is hopeful about the future of the industry, and while he believes women in VC will make big gains in the coming years, he says every conversation and every woman investing for the first time, at Pelion or elsewhere, is a win.
“It’s just like running a marathon. You don’t run a marathon on Day 1. You build, and you train, and you learn, and you experience,” Modersitzki says. “If we’re going to make a shift within the venture industry and make it more diversified, then we need to start today.”
VC with equal representation
Creating opportunities for more women in VC is not just about increasing gender equity. VC firms are, after all, businesses. Getting more women involved could help the bottom line.
Green says when more women take part in investment decisions, they make innovative decisions. They take time to zoom out and hold space for their intuition in an industry that often prioritizes quick, data-driven choices.
“Having female leaders who can step outside the confines of those pressures and model a different way of doing things, I think, is really impactful,” Green says. In her opinion, increasing diversity helps VCs find opportunities that others might miss. “There is so much economic opportunity that sits outside the parameters of very narrow, traditional venture pattern recognition. There just is.”
Cook is optimistic that as more women prove the value they can bring as investors and entrepreneurs, more women will see a place for themselves to join in, including her four daughters.
“They all want to be entrepreneurs, and they will be,” Cook says. “They don’t believe that there’s anything that can stop them, and I’m really glad to see that.”