The Golden State overtook Germany as the world’s fourth-largest economy in 2023, but not all of this wealth is being shared equally. In this series, The Fuller Project, the global investigative newsroom focused on women, examined the power structures that hold back women, especially women of color, from sharing equally in California’s prosperity. These women drive the economy of the nation’s second most diverse state but don’t get their fair share of the pie.
Silicon Valley companies are shaping the future of our world. However, sexism is so deeply entrenched in the tech industry that the exclusion of women from all aspects of this sector is simply taken for granted.
The same is true for the heavily subsidized green energy sector, where our reporting found men predominate at every level – from executive positions in the corporate suites to working-class jobs installing solar panels on rooftops.
Five years after the #MeToo movement rocked corporate boardrooms, women continue to hold a tiny percentage of leadership positions in Silicon Valley and venture capital. Startups founded by all-female teams accounted for just two percent of venture funding last year, according to the business data firm PitchBook. Those led by Black women and Latinas received even less. The trend is bad; the percentage of women-led firms receiving venture capital funding has declined over the last twenty years.
This means that more than half the population is having little influence on shaping the most powerful tools changing our world. Disparities at the top feed discrimination at the bottom, as tech products designed by men often have a negative impact on women, especially women of color. The burgeoning artificial intelligence sector is making things worse. The crisis is so acute that even talking about it can provoke feelings of powerlessness and nihilism. But it doesn’t need to be this way.
At The Fuller Project, we trained our investigative reporting chops on systemic disparities in two of the most powerful industries in the nation’s most populous state and made a big difference.
At the same time, we took on systems impacting women, especially women of color, on the lower end of the economic spectrum. We exposed a shocking rise in the number of homeless women in the Golden State and examined the consequences of domestic violence on economic opportunity. In so doing, we helped to create a more just and equitable society.
