Sunday, January 28, 2007

In Case You're Curious: Some Forbes Midas List Demographics

I made a very very quick run through the Forbes Midas List, curious about the demographics. Below is a quick tally -- mind you, my approximation of race and gender are judged purely from the pictures and names. If someone looked Asian to me, I marked them as such without wikipedia-ing them to make sure I was correct. It is lazy of me, but my goal here is to be only directionally correct (not exactly right). Here are the approximate demographics:


When I did this run-through, something caught my eye: In 2007, 4 out of the 5 female VCs who were featured in the list invest solely in Life Sciences. My curiosity piqued, I did another quick run-through to see how the demographics shook down when I separated the list by people who invest in Technology (including Healthcare) vs. people who invest purely in Life Sciences.

Again, I'm not writing a statistical thesis here and made a very very crass approximation: when people invest both in Life Sciences and Technology companies (e.g., Thomas Ng, Parag Saxena, Jeffrey Drazan, and Scott Bonham) I decided to count them only as half a point. If I wanted to be more accurate, I would have looked at each of their portfolios and used the ratio of Technology:Life Sciences investments that person made. But again, I am not going for exactly right. Given that caveat, here are the results:



1 comments:

Cheyne said...

Interesting - thoughts on the implications?

re: life sciences
Hmm...educational trends?

Premise 1: More likely VCs in life sciences studied pre-med or related fields in college? VCs in tech studied a technology or biz field?

Premise 2: The male/female ratio in medical studies is lower than the male/female ratio for technology/business studies? (I don't have a source for this..)


And then there's the traditional social convention associating women with nurturing -> healthcare -> life sciences?