Chinese VC: We don’t invest in female CEOs

Really guys? Photo credit: gstockstudio / 123RF.

China’s investment and business world has the reputation of being more equitable than that of other Asian countries – or in some ways, Silicon Valley. After all, one of Mao’s famous maxims was “women hold up half the sky.”

It turns out there’s still a lot of work to be done.

“Rule number 10: we usually don’t invest in female CEOs,” stated Luo Mingxiong from Jingbei Investment, an early-stage VC firm, in a public presentation last week in Beijing.

“It’s not because of any kind of prejudice. Just think about it carefully […] besides giving birth to children, what can women do better than men? Nothing,” added a blog post from the VC firm summarizing Luo’s speech. “If the company CEO is a man, but a lot of the chairmen are women, we typically won’t invest in either. Why? Because it shows that the entrepreneur […] can’t recruit equally excellent and ambitious male executives.”

Photo credit: @曹山石 on Weibo, via Shirley Lin’s Facebook.

Responses on social media ranged from outrage to sarcasm. Chinese netizens on Weibo pointed out Jingbei’s weak portfolio, while others said Mingxiong had “straight man cancer,” a Chinese slang term used to call out sexism.

“I don’t think it’s as uncommon as we hope,” Rui Ma, a former investor at 500 Startups, tells Tech in Asia. “His reasons are pretty common. Some people will say: don’t invest in single girls [because] they’re unstable.”

“Even on the investment side, people are definitely sexist,” she says. “For example, I have been in the past and multiple times contacted by executive head-hunters […] They’ll say, Rui, really wish I could push you because you really fit most of these job requirements but you’re a girl.”

A lot of people are going for pure aggressiveness, ruthlessness, speed – especially in China.

According to the Grant Thornton International Business Report for 2016, China has a higher percentage of women in senior roles compared to the global average – 30 percent versus 24. In the country’s investment world, quite a few institutions are led by women, such as Anna Fang, CEO of ZhenFund, one of China’s leading seed funds, and Chen Xiaohong, founder of H Capital, a China-focused VC firm.

Despite the relatively high representation of women, strong prejudices remain, particularly when it comes to defining what women are good at, and what they’re not.

“In China, I think many people won’t consider this sexist,” Ken Xu, partner of Gobi Ventures, tells Tech in Asia, referring to Jingbei Investment’s statement. “If you see entrepreneurship as a type of work, they probably think female entrepreneurs are not well-suited for it.”