Seventeen years apart. The line barely moved.

In 2009, all-female founding teams received roughly 1.3 percent of US venture capital dollars. In 2026, after 17 years of pledges, panels, named diversity initiatives, record commitments, and dedicated funds, the figure is 2.1 percent. Seventeen years apart. The line barely moved. is the receipt the venture capital industry has been hoping no one would pull. The conversation moved by orders of magnitude. The line items in the LP decks moved. The number that actually matters, the share of US VC dollars reaching companies founded by women, moved by less than one percentage point.

This visual puts the 2009 baseline and the 2026 figure on the same axis so the gap between rhetoric and capital is impossible to round away. Sourced from the PitchBook NVCA Venture Monitor, Crunchbase Diversity Spotlight, All Raise, and the Babson College Diana Project, the comparison covers the full window of the modern diversity-in-VC conversation. For female founders raising capital today, this is the context the pitch is happening inside. The system has not been quietly fixing itself in the background. For LPs, fund managers, and ecosystem builders, this is the data point that should reframe what counts as progress. A trendline that climbs less than a percentage point over almost two decades is not progress. It is proof that the gender gap in venture capital funding is structural, persistent, and not going to close on its own. Stop celebrating the conversation. Watch the number.