GreenBiz
The Case for Raising Up Women in Climate Tech
After all, one of the most surprising conclusions from our work — disclaimer, I served on Project Drawdown’s founding board of directors — is that empowering women and girls represents the most impactful tool for achieving a climate-safe future. Yes, you read that correctly. Among the 80 solutions evaluated for their potential to reverse global warming, educating girls and ensuring women have access to family planning resources ranked No. 6 and 7, respectively. By empowering women and girls globally, Project Drawdown calculated that we could avoid 120 billion tons of emissions by 2050. That’s equivalent to roughly 10 years’ worth of China’s annual emissions as of 2014 — an amount that far surpasses the 90 billion ton avoidance potential of Drawdown’s top-ranked solution, refrigerant management.
Unfortunately, the trend lines for women entrepreneurs aren’t as heartening — at least not yet. In 2019, just 2.8 percent of VC funding went to women-led ventures — a meager all-time high that fell to 2.3 percent in 2020, according to Crunchbase figures. It makes sense, given that only about 12 percent of decision-makers at VC firms are women, and most still don’t have a single female partner.