Women are the secret ingredient in Latin America’s outsized returns

Claire Diaz-OrtizContributorShare on TwitterClaire Diaz-Ortiz is an angel investor and bestselling author of nine books that have been published in more than a dozen countries. An early employee at Twitter, she was called "The Woman Who Got the Pope on Twitter" by Wired and holds an MBA and other degrees from Stanford and Oxford.More posts by this contributor

• Women are the secret ingredient in Latin America's outsized returns

Read the first part of this article, Latin America takes the global lead in VC directed to female co-founders, on Extra Crunch.

Latin America lags when it comes to female investors

Interestingly, these positive numbers for Latin America come in spite of a lack of female investing partners in Latin America.

New data shows that only 7% of VCs with check-writing ability in Latin America are women. This is just over half the current U.S. average of 12%.

See the full data set here.

This is a critical finding, given that studies indicate that investments in female founded or co-founded teams increase when more women sit across the table as investors.¹ Specifically, 2019 research shows that women invest in female entrepreneurs at nearly three times the rate of male investors.²

This means that Latin America could be on the early side of a positive cycle. In other words, more female investors in Latin America would lead to more female co-founders, and faster exits at higher valuations.

Other parts of the world have seen the effects of this positive cycle. Sophia Bendz, a partner at leading European VC Atomico, has watched this happen: "I've seen first-hand the impact having female investment partners can have on increasing the amount of investment into female-led companies."