Fortune’s 2026 Summit Lineup Puts Venture Capital’s Gender Gap on the Agenda

Fortune revealed on October 5 the speaker lineup for its 2026 Most Powerful Women Summit (October 12–14, Santa Barbara), featuring entrepreneurs Hailey Bieber and Tina Knowles alongside venture capital leaders and investment executives. The lineup brings together venture investors and founders whose work touches directly on how capital reaches women-led companies.

The timing reflects a widening disconnect between female founders’ demonstrated performance and their access to capital. Despite generating 78 cents of revenue per dollar invested—nearly 2.5 times the return profile of male-founded companies—female founders secured just 1 to 2 percent of U.S. venture capital in recent years. The summit convenes the investors and entrepreneurs who control whether the funding gap closes or widens further.

Who’s speaking and what they represent

The summit brings together venture investors positioned to direct capital toward women-led startups. Laela Sturdy, managing partner at CapitalG (Google’s venture capital arm), and Terri Burns, founder of Type Capital, are listed among speakers. Meena Flynn, who leads Global Private Wealth Management at Goldman Sachs, is also participating. On the founder side, entrepreneur Emma Grede and Hailey Bieber—founder and chief creative officer of Rhode, her skincare brand—are scheduled.

Their presence signals different investor archetypes. Google’s venture capital arm represents megafund capital invested across emerging technology. Type Capital, founded by Burns, is a founder-led fund. Goldman Sachs’ private wealth management controls capital for ultra-high-net-worth individuals and family offices. Together, these speakers represent three different investor archetypes: institutional megafunds, mission-aligned smaller funds, and private wealth networks.

Bieber’s inclusion reflects the summit’s emphasis on founder success. She built Rhode into a brand acquired by Elf Beauty, demonstrating the growth trajectory and exit outcomes investors seek. Tina Knowles, listed among speakers as an American businesswoman and author, adds perspective on brand building and business leadership outside traditional corporate hierarchies.

The concentration problem
The top five female-founded startups accounted for 79 percent of all capital raised by female-founded teams in 2025, according to the Female Founders Fund’s 2026 annual review, as reported by Leading Ladies Business. The remaining 87 female-founded companies split significantly less capital among themselves, illustrating how venture capital toward women founders concentrates in a handful of deals.

The capital gap the summit addresses

Female founders face a stark reality: all-female founding teams received just 1 percent of total U.S. venture capital in 2024, according to data from Leading Ladies Business. That figure is down from 2 percent the year before, suggesting the funding gap for all-female teams is widening rather than holding steady. A headline figure of $73.6 billion raised by female-founded companies in 2025 masked extreme concentration: two artificial-intelligence companies—Anthropic and Scale AI—accounted for over $30 billion of that total.

The disparity persists despite female-founded companies’ proven track record. Boston Consulting Group research found that women entrepreneurs generated 78 cents of revenue per dollar invested, compared to 31 cents at male-founded companies. First Round Capital’s decade-long study found that companies with female founders performed 63 percent better than all-male teams. PitchBook’s 2024 data separately found that female-founded startups exited about six months faster on average than male-founded companies and burned 15 percent less capital than male counterparts.

Decision-making power compounds the imbalance. Eighty-two percent of decision-makers at U.S. venture capital firms with at least $50 million in assets under management are men, according to data cited in Leading Ladies Business analysis. Only 17.3 percent of VC decision-making roles are held by women, and nearly three-quarters of U.S. VC firms have no female investing partners. Those statistics matter because investor demographics shape which founders receive capital. Beyond individual firm leadership, roughly 70 percent of venture capital deals originate from closed investor networks with historically limited female access.

Female-founded startups deliver 2.5 times better returns than male-founded companies, yet receive just 1 to 2 percent of venture capital.

Structural barriers and what the summit signals

Why does this gap persist despite female founders’ superior returns? Research points to pattern matching and unconscious bias. Investors default to replicating past success profiles—which, because venture capital has historically been male-dominated, means favoring male founders. Studies show investors tend to ask female founders prevention-focused questions, about avoiding failure, while asking male founders promotion-focused questions, about pursuing big wins. This framing difference influences both investment decisions and the capital amounts allocated.

By including these particular investors and founders among this year’s speakers, Fortune is reframing founder funding not as a diversity issue but as an economic one. The inclusion of Google’s venture capital lead and Goldman Sachs wealth management executive signals that institutional money is beginning to view women founder access to capital as a strategic priority—or, at minimum, acknowledges that the current system is leaving returns on the table.

This summit lineup also reflects growing acknowledgment that women entrepreneurs are being systematically excluded from early-stage funding and insider investor networks. According to LinkedIn data cited by Webtonic, women comprise only 28 percent of founders and 31 percent of leadership roles in venture capital and private equity, yet they control a larger share of business ownership (40.6 percent of all U.S. businesses as of 2026, per Wells Fargo data) than their access to venture capital suggests.

For female founders beyond the summit’s invited guest list, the summit’s existence and programming send a message: the gap between female founder ambition and female founder funding is large enough and persistent enough that investors and companies are dedicating a conference block to addressing it. Whether that attention translates into structural change—in how check writing works, whose networks get access to deal flow, or how VC firms staff investment teams—remains to be seen.

Photo: Detroit Regional Chamber from Detroit, MI, United States · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons