Members of a coalition of Los Angeles-based venture capital and tech firms working to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion are outpacing national trends in investments in Black, Latinx, and women founders but disparities remain, a survey by PledgeLA finds.

Launched in October 2018, PledgeLA is a partnership between the Annenberg Foundation, the Office of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, and more than two hundred venture capital firms and tech companies working to increase equity, community engagement, and accountability around corporate diversity efforts. According to its third annual member survey (9 pages, PDF), while the share of Black founders in PledgeLA VC firms' portfolios grew from 7 percent in 2020 to 12 percent in 2020 and that of Latinx founders grew from 6 percent to 8 percent, they remain far smaller than the shares of white and Asian founders, which fell slightly from 61 percent to 56 percent and from 26 percent to 25 percent, respectively. The share of women founders rose slightly, from 18 percent to 19 percent. By comparison, in 2019 the shares of Black, Latinx, and women founders in all U.S. venture capital portfolios were just 2 percent, 1 percent, and 11 percent.

In terms of member VC firms' employee diversity, the survey found that while the majority of employees were white (54 percent) and only 8 percent and 6 percent were Black and Latinx, the shares of employees who identified as LGBTQ and as having a disability jumped from 7 percent to 25 percent and from 10 percent to 41 percent.

Among member tech companies, the survey found significant racial/ethnic disparities in average salary, which ranged from $60,000 for Latinx employees to $120,000 for East Asian employees. The gender pay gap, which the 2020 survey revealed as being wider than the national average, persisted into 2021, with average salaries for men significantly higher than those for women across nearly all experience levels. Only women with between ten and twenty years' experience earned more on average than men with the same level of experience ($144,000 vs. $130,000), while men with more than twenty years' experience earned more than twice as much as women with the same experience ($152,000 vs. $61,800).

With support from Earvin "Magic" and Cookie Johnson and the Anthony and Jeanne Pritzker Family Foundation, PledgeLA will expand over the next two years to serve early-stage Black and Latinx founders across Los Angeles County. As part of the effort, the coalition will convene a task force to address ongoing regional concerns around racial and gender pay equity and expand core programs designed to increase access to jobs for women, people of color, and underrepresented groups.

"The Annenberg Foundation and our chairman, Wallis Annenberg, created PledgeLA to ensure that all Angelenos benefit from the growth of our Los Angeles tech and innovation sector," said Annenberg Foundation executive director Cinny Kennard. "Despite the persistent challenges we face, the impact made over the last three years shows our collective's tremendous potential. In that time, PledgeLA has matched nearly a hundred and fifty underrepresented Angelenos with paid opportunities in tech and VC, provided $500,000 in grants to founders of color, and fostered a regional spirit of accountability and action."

(Photo credit: GettyImages)