For nine years, All Raise has been trying to get more power into the hands of women in Silicon Valley. When the organization was founded in 2017, women held just 9% of partner roles in venture. In 2018, All Raise set a goal to help women double that to 18% of partner titles at VC firms, and surpassed it in 2025. But something didn’t feel right. If women were advancing across the investment world, why didn’t things feel different? Men were still running the largest funds and writing the biggest checks for the splashiest deals. There was a sense among women in Silicon Valley that things hadn’t changed as much as the data suggested.
Looking into the data confirmed something was off. Despite holding 18.8% of partnership roles in 2025, women led only 12.6% of deals and held 11.2% of board seats. Women and people of color in venture in the U.S. controlled just 1.4% of assets under management. “Having a title doesn’t mean you have power and influence,” realized All Raise CEO Paige Hendrix Buckner. “Title has moved faster than power in the industry.”
That realization has led All Raise to a new quest. Instead of tracking women’s progression to partner roles, it’s searching for a new definition of power entirely.
While titles can be a useful metric, there seems to be an epidemic of women being promoted to partner without real power. At firms with more than $1 billion in assets under management, 25% of women with a partner title are in advisory or non-voting roles; only 14.8% of men are. That means some women have a title without the authority to actually write a check and without earning carried interest from their successes. Sometimes, they can’t even officially claim credit for deals they bring into the firm. That can be normal in venture, where deals are attributed to top partners, but seems to be affecting women more.
After realizing the shortcomings of tracking titles, the challenge for All Raise is to figure out what to track instead. And to answer the question: What is power, exactly? There likely won’t be one clean metric. The group is looking at deal count, board seats, and deal attribution. It’s seeking to understand who sits on firms’ internal investment committees, which is not always transparent.
Meanwhile, more than 300 women are leading their own firms. And only one in 20 say not being promoted was the reason they went out on their own.
“I think about all the men that we know by first name only: Jeff and Sam and Mark and Marc,” Hendrix Buckner says. “Our job is to help add to the pantheon, with Kirsten and Aileen and Daniela. Those are the names we pattern-match against, and lore is everything in venture and startups.”
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world.
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